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poetry by Natalie Crick

Sunday School

by Natalie Crick

 

Madeline loves it
And sits as Mother would.
The priest is like her Father
Dressed all in grey,

Palms fluttering with
Paper clowns,
Legs and arms spinning anti-clockwise
Like the priest’s eyes slide

From side to side.
We are his for an hour
But he cannot touch us,
For we are jewels to be watched,

And, one day taken.
Nobody has ever held his hand
But Grandmother, with rings like
Little girl’s warnings.

This is my house of God,
Rain thundering as
Unanswered questions.
Their faces are taught and chilled with frost.

He is the bee of androgyny
Thrusting candelabras as tusks.
This drone of activity,
It is all too much for me.

Faces dumb as naked dolls.
He strips them, licking them with stars
Like potential girlfriends
Or meats to be weighed.


 

The Other

 

She was a girl of the Convent.
A small girl
With big blue eyes
On Valentine’s day.

The sun set and she wanted to die,
Locked in the old house in the hill,
Rocking with emotion.
The man in the moon was black with hate

Like her Father. She was sick with paranoia,
Riddled with the voices of her children.
O God! Someone was calling.
In her dreams.

Lost in bedlam,
A thin ghost
Was running with a sword.
I am ready.

She woke drugged,
And a widow today.
Bitter as a spider.
Murderous too, with news of her Mother.

So she turned to The Other.
Bowing down to God.
A dark place
Where she would hardly know herself.

 

 

Standing In The Woods

 

I am watching you
From the woods.
From the cold and dark
And I am touching myself,
Locked in limbs of kindling.
I am watching you.

Chimneys are rotten grey hairs,
Or persons paralysed or sad.
Look at the shrunken houses
With their space shifting through chains, like horses’ eyes
Flattened by dread. Down there, you
Grant the stench of illness, like a bed

In which a dog died one day.
Inside the breathing sea of bluebells
I notice that pretty bit of clay.
Far above, and now below, where little boys run all day,
Squashing shells of flies, whose whispers
Float about forgotten.
When they land they bang the drums
And creep out
With all their fingers and their tongues
To where
I stand tall, my smile reaching
Because the sun is shining.

 

 

 

BIO

natalie crickNatalie Crick has found delight in writing all of her life and first began writing when she was a very young girl. Her poetry is influenced by melancholic confessional Women’s poetry. Her poetry has been published in a range of journals and magazines including Cannons Mouth, Cyphers, Ariadne’s Thread, Carillon and National Poetry Anthology 2013.

 

 

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