by: Natalie Crick
With their subtle, graceful music, Natalie Crick’s poems sing with slow and patient melancholy of how the difficult world denies our need for explanation and connection, and instead gives us “the threadbare crags of cloud/ that fell apart to rain,” our lived experience nothing more than a “loose suitcase of storms.”
By the Light of Dawn
Rains arrive.
Rivulet, replete with rusted dust,
Loose suitcases of storms.
The thin grey skim of sky
Breaks with a howl.
I am lost, without
The slow simmer of dawn, when
The sun rises red
And the crop comes in,
Deep and golden.
We wade into the burning lake
And we wait.
The Lovers
Old woman stands
At the window
Watching the moon slipping loose
Of its skin,
Leaves dappled with light,
Breath like heat lightening.
Now the stars
Barely blink in the dark
And the beggarly moon
Treasures it’s myopia of desire.
After dark, lovers
Carry blankets down
To the water’s edge
Beneath a clemency of cloud.
She grew lonely as a
Sheep ghosting the field
As they emerged each night
From the darkness,
The way the Earth
Dreams a coming fluency of snow.
Daylight
Dawn gave us only grey,
Then threadbare crags of cloud
That fell apart to rain.
Mist-crowned and veiled,
The gaunt forms of buildings
Throng about us, hulking
In a quiet parade across the beaches,
Drowned to their ashen foundations.
The moon waits to be released,
Safe beneath the black lid of night
That rests upon
The evening’s jaded hinge.
Natalie Crick, from Newcastle in the UK, has found delight in writing all of her life and first began writing when she was a very young girl. She graduated from Newcastle University with a degree in English Literature and plans to pursue an MA at Newcastle this year. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in a range of journals and magazines including Interpreters House, The Chiron Review, Rust and Moth, Ink in Thirds and The Penwood Review. Her work also features or is forthcoming in a number of anthologies, including Lehigh Valley Vanguard Collections 13. This year her poem, “Sunday School” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
