.png)
the poet
A GP living in England's Peak District, Sarah Raybould has had her poetry published by Black Bough Poetry, Ink Sweat &Tears and IceFloe Press amongst others. She's been nominated twice for The Pushcart Prize, and was commissioned to write and perform for English Touring Opera in 2023. Sarah takes part in local spoken word events, and typically writes of love, nature and finding deeper meaning in the ordinary.
the poems
The Ones That Miss
Some are steel tipped, angled too low,
others fly past deliberately off target.
There are whispers that woodsmen
stalk deer in this glade.
We are taught that to be hunted will look like
running
but she is a glass chalice,
/ saintly / crystalline,
rubies in her ears
and the silver scars on her birch-back soul
are not visible under ripples of chiffon
and her / smile / is a poised river
enduring down the pleats of corduroy hills
and her heart is cracked porcelain,
guarded
by a plot and a tiny voice
that calls
mum.
After the Storm
At first glance, hush (hush)
alight where mist fingers the arching dawn,
submission of wrangled bough,
stooped low sorrel cradles tears
like pregnant dimples,
wax-green, twitch-bright,
blades of trampled cotton-grass,
unhitch in knee-jerk flick,
reluctant rodents peep through spyholes
crowned from weeping stems
and elven eyelets coil at bracken’s end.
Hold vigil, let cloud / contract /
masquerade of sleeping pools confess
as pulp and souse of sphagnum moss
christen with sequins cupped in goblin hands,
insistent, brim and bubbling
revive the curlew calls.
The Boathouse
After visiting the home of Dylan Thomas in Laugharne
With references to Under Milk Wood
From the apricot sea-lit harbour
to a star-gulled lighthouse
crouching on all twelve of the moon hours,
slip-silt of the night licking bottomless fishing nets
clean in the seething surf.
Imagine the gust and gale
riding cliff-top turf fish-lapping spray
as river phantoms rove the rolling Tâf
to the wrestling knucklerock ruins
on the wings of the tide.
Would he rhyme-wrangle with the
briny-deep headstrong jaws of the sea?
Or plunder their muddy dungeons?
Would blind Captain Cat croon
to the scum and morass of strangled souls
in the deep whale-blue snake-streamered
gob of the moon’s looking glass?
Would he conjure Rosie from the eel-weed
watery plughole, and the scolding mothers
and the droll-toll town bell?
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb