There’s The Big Things

The ash that screams into the night,
the lake that dries, the child amongst the rubble,
the heat, the fire, the lack of books,
the men who’ve clearly lost their minds.

And then there’s the small. The glass that smashes
on the floor, a relic glazed in blue.
The seedlings devoured in their pots,
the text that rattles round a broken phone,

the children needing less and less,
a sense of being all alone. A backwards glance,
a hurried kiss, left on edge in sweat and fear,
not knowing how to survive at all.

In the night the stomach swells,
and water churns around. A tiny foot
imprints skin, from the inside out.
I’m woken by birds at dawn to this
back-to-front and broken dream

and now you pull away,
umbilicus strained,
a leaf that falls,
a different season yet again.

Sarah Nathan is a teacher and writer from East Lothian, Scotland. She has poems featured in The Dark Horse, Outcrop Poetry, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and forthcoming in The Poetry Lighthouse and from the roots (Glasgow University’s creative writing anthology). When not in the classroom she can mostly be found at the beach.