Water Baby

I too am alone in the world.
The egg birthed a life,
lips hushed, lilac chilled.
When I turned away,
you paled into mist.
You are too small for this world,
but not small enough to be forgotten.

I want to feel
the warm milk of your smile.
I want to see your reflection
in the moon’s mirror, polished like spring bones.
I want to hear the light ribbons of your
breath; a hollow song, doused in sleep.

But most of all,
I want to catch your
life’s secrets crawled up out of the sea.
They will echo in my solitude,
each little mystery welling up from your soul.

Through the storm
I listen to the sea’s clamouring jaws
her mouth awash with children.

My love for you is floating,
rising, to the centre of my being.
My girl: sailing in a boat of stars.  

Farm Talk

The winds have changed.
Our drowned trees lean together, estranged.
Crows flare into dusk. The sky sours and
fallow fields melt into the hours,
lie quiet under the waxing moon.
As midnight tolls
our voices trip off the eaves, trick the light
in strange, lost raptures,
dust of cornstalks lifting into the black,
grief, like stars, the night might devour. 

One day you will remember:
the aroma of mulch and dread, December,
the funeral hymn,
and you will turn away from it, in sin. 

Natalie Crick has poems published in The Moth, Banshee, Bare Fiction, Strix, The Manchester Review, New Welsh Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and elsewhere. She is studying for an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University and will commence an MPhil in Creative Writing at Newcastle University in 2019.  Natalie has read her poetry at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2018 and 2019. As well as other successes in competitions, her poetry has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize twice, shortlisted for The Anthony Cronin International Poetry Award 2018, commended in the 2019 Hippocrates Open Awards for Poetry and Medicine and runner-up in the PBS & Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition 2018, judged by Carol Ann Duffy. Natalie’s micro-pamphlet, Lullabies, was published by Bitterzoet Press (Brighton, 2018). Her collaborative chapbook with The Black Light Engine Room Press is forthcoming.