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Sarah Holland
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the poet
Sarah Holland is a writer, poet and meditation teacher living in rural England. She's a regular at the writing groups and open mics held by the Poetry Pharmacy, where she also teaches mindful writing practices. This is the very first time Sarah's poems have been published.
the poems
Unseen
The sly smile of flesh
knows its own beauty.
Somewhere, a naked body
is screaming, sweating, still.
It howls when uncapped
by sleeves, cold slicing bone,
shocked by its own need to be covered.
Now a lonely, lost landscape, blindly eroded.
Tiny streams in rivulets you won’t remember weren’t always there.
Your care of my nakedness is all I will ever know of love.
When I’m next uncovered, I’ll no longer witness myself being seen.
Dress in Stars
The dress is clustered with flowers
join the lines between the nodes to
find her stories in the eyes of the stars.
Virgo
Here I trace a girl standing proud in new folds of fabric
paid for by her own wreath-weaving hands.
The hem is hitched to her waist in a teenage tryst
the stars hold her heart when broken.
Draco
The dress becomes lazy, lounging in corners
forgotten for pyjamas and red-tipped hair
and freedom and pint-size laughter.
Notes are absent, margins full of rhyme.
Aquarius
The fabric sprawls dazed with travel
on a bugged bunk-bed. See here, a map of islands,
an elephant’s wrinkled ear, the currency of symbols
smoke singing from the folds.
The Bears
Here is a woman now, buying new dresses
from markets, city-chic, following rivers to
return to the ring where the bear
was tied to steps and she will sometimes wait.
Gemini
The straps sting like cuts on reddened shoulders
muddied by festival swamps.
Friends fade to twin with pole stars.
Behind a closed door, the dress hangs limp and worn.
Leo
The dress has been lifted from sun-striped skin
a tigress released again and again
and again she curls alone into her warmth
and swims the wide water.
Hercules
Hold the dress as carefully as that first love
hang from a hook that drags the door
but remember to hope. There is still space in
its starred sky amongst the moss-worn patches.
Gargoyles
I had remembered you wrong with a hoop in your ear
but the curls were real that uncoiled from a cap
another woman pressed to your scalp.
Coffee from a market stall instantly chilled
as the wind whipped the steam to the
gargoyles who supped it like breath.
We chose a face for each of us
and perhaps that was a gift,
seeing how we would soon jeer
across the distance, bitterness spitting the air.
I wanted you to ease me down the river on
a boat you had made, wade with me across
the brown water. I thought it would be glassy,
our faces two stars reflected there.
But we were just tourists, disappointed by
the churn of the silt and the slime and the mud,
a memory punishing itself again and again.
The bridge suspended us over floods
that might have carried us to fences, flowers.
We didn’t know we’d be sucked under,
crushed by the wheels of a tour bus
as a gargoyle cackled, ringing from a city’s tall tower.
I scratch into stone with my nail
I don’t want to write these poems anymore
but my blood obscures the words.
I want to cup you in my palm
feel your breath mist my skin.
We played house in a home I thought had two beds.
I still feel the warmth in our current as I flick fragments
of stone into the ripples, sneers etched over smiles,
but even though I’ve been here before, we are forever gargoyles.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb
