Wild Court

An international poetry journal based in the English Department of King’s College London

A poem by Nicola Healey

Below is a poem from Nicola Healey’s debut pamphlet, A Newer Wilderness, published by Dare-Gale Press this month.

Summer/Winter

This brazen blue day is a dangerous scene.
My mind clashes like a dropped cymbal.
My skin, like all my clothes,
doesn’t fit well.

I go indoors but I can’t shake myself
and the sun still glowers:
Enjoy me, make the most of me,
a gaudy refrain.

Desultory summer is uncompromising.
The relentless light overbears nights
and dendrites like an interrogation.
There is no escape, no
soul shade.

I start to think of winter – long for it.
The illumined trees
line up like lost souls.
With no body of leaves,
I feel a freeing unity.

Winter, dealing in bare truths, does not expect
or deceive: takes us as it finds us.

Winter kneels down and supplicates beside you,
like a silent suffering saint.

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Author:

Nicola Healey

Nicola Healey’s poems, essays and reviews have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Scientific American and elsewhere. She is the author of Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Her first poetry pamphlet, A Newer Wilderness, was published by Dare-Gale Press in April 2024.