Sarah Raybould
Sarah Raybould is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet from the Derbyshire Peak District.
She has always loved story writing and poetry but scribbled journal entries, collage and the odd poem posted on Facebook was all that survived years of medical training and motherhood. During the pandemic she started to reach for her pen in earnest again.
Over the past 18 months her poetry and mixed-genre work have appeared in publications with IceFloe Press, Ink Sweat and Tears, Black Bough Poetry, iamb, Arcana Poetry Press, After…amongst others and have been shortlisted for the Rough Diamond Poetry Prize and longlisted in the Walk Listen Create Write About Walking poetry competition.
Instagram: @raybould_sarah
X: @raybould_drs
Bluesky: @sarahraybould.bsky.social
Alone at the Loch
an orange buoy becomes my soul
on growling waves that yesterday
were ironed still. Gauging if I can swim
is an unconscious need to understand
survival. Invasion shored
with sungods who prayed for blue
but the shudder of gothic-water
ushers me in. There is a shamefulness
in the way we were taught to conjure
a vertical future, sky-pencilling
to pine-pierce the ceiling
of another’s glory, force rainfall.
Degas Paints a Scene from the Third Stanza
After ‘Pied Beauty’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins
A daub of shadowgloss
to capture the crushed hem of every almost,
flesh-raw with unblended grace
and chiffon torn in the wings of rehearsal.
An ochre glaze to blunt exposure
the way the body knows how to recoil,
the way slant light is tender,
the way Prussian blue will always
find a way to move you.
An angle you didn’t see until now,
stippled and sundark, ill-lit
with impossibility.
And we ask, is this still beauty?
Broken Glass
I gather shards of what is left,
the paradox of fracture,
the way stained glass is a trap
for shattered light on iridescent edges.
Red turned ruby,
snared at the splintered point
where we split into prisms,
learnt, too late, cut glass still dazzles.
There are broken lines in a lightning strike,
a bird shell smashed in blue halves,
swallows punctuating telephone lines
with exclamation marks.
First Frost
wasn’t expected so soon,
marble-cast,
spike and sting of ice-bound spell,
a puff of dragon’s breath
loiters lovesick in her lair,
a magic draught
to crystallise each stem and blade of evening poised
in pastel trance, a moor of arctic statuettes,
two trees turned to stone,
their wands erect contest reluctant dusk,
a rune
etched on bark where splinters gather white
and I
rooted to the spot.
Keep Out
The door is ajar,
wood sticks on stone,
warped, weathered,
a spyhole where the key used to fit.
Frogspawn simmers
in bubbles of pond soup,
a dunnock hopping in the hitched-up
thorny hem of leafy skirts.
I draw boundaries in ivy and nettle
bewildered by the extravagance
of memory left to incubate,
pioneer complexity,
cultivate its own ecosystem,
the thicketed, bramble-burred
prodigal
I could not prune.
After Emily Dickinson
I’ll tell you how grief is like the Sun –
Solstice-sequels – a halo undefined –
from blinding Strobe of piercing light
to furtive fray of Spectral shrine –
Night and day obedient
to the latitude of Obsession’s orbit –
showing up in different shades –
secret Eclipse – flaws Illuminated –
Some days feel like Love’s embrace
– Kindled and insistent –
Some Cloudchoked – but not alone –
just Burning in the distance.
A narwhal changes colour with age
to blend in with its surroundings
to be surface water, icefloe or sea floor.
I contemplate the shades of adulthood,
the grey skin of milestones,
how light reflects off the tarmac
in the playground to make us mottled,
how easy it was to swim with the pod.
But now my pigment is changing again,
finds sanctuary in the midnight sun,
gliding against ice drift, freshwater estuaries -
where camouflage is not vital for existence
anymore.
Enola/Alone
Her voice became a tide of transposition,
a flawless alchemy,
sound of rosewood echoes
laid in air-strum tombs.
If lyrics could hold their breath
they would trawl bass notes
for acoustic currents,
weighed by the resonance
of a singular chord.
Now when I miss her
I listen for the sea.
We have seagulls too -
surfers in skyscape,
saddling crests of buttercup brine,
a mob of plotting jackdaws,
tin-drum strewn and spattered,
kelp-clad oak and beech-front,
weathered wood swell-soused,
earthy cow-clod scents
and tractor oil. I reimagine
laughter from the pier,
salt-crust, the liberation of collision,
ice-rouse, tender pulse on shores
that smooth blunt edges.
Summer Camp
It is a blue-bottle day,
summer has put on her short skirt,
lounges lazily -
hammocked between mountains.
She tiptoes to the water’s lip,
fearful to be seen without makeup,
sun-bleached and bald.
Narrow Spaces
Skewers of light squeeze
into narrow crypts –
invite retreat.
We learn how to expand in the trickery of dark,
adjust to the climate of a conscience
where the duplicity of light is deposed.
Neon clots -
we slink from exile,
shrink a little.
Painting in Green
I collect sap from a leaking branch,
borrow a smile from a concealed sparrow,
let drizzle drip.
I welcome dilution,
the bleeding of a pigment
that adheres,
trees slipping off the canvas
with muddy intolerance,
a glimmering cathedral
of beech, oak and sapling
wading in ambiguity,
the pallor of absent borders
where gradient becomes a measure
of how far
we can run in the rain.
Head Cave
After so much rain, I yield
on calcite, investigate
the clints and grykes,
fissure-down to subterranean caverns
fashioned for me
to temper with grief and grace
in her hip-bone belly.
Water weathers wounds
in my darkrage, pressure rising,
furyfisted, greet sunlight,
breach rock and restraint to
erupt
in thunderous opulence.
Everlasting
We forage downstream,
push past dislocation, calloused boughs,
chisel solace from the scab on puckered bark,
carve our names in the lucency of astral scars.
Hollow wood hosts the language of love
as it slow-grows to self-repair,
remembering how it feels
to be held,
to find a delta where the tatters
of discernment and decay can drift —
silken—
thorny.
My Writing
Poetry is a language I have probably been trying to speak all my life. I resonate with Edmond Jabès’s sentiment that poetry bridges or translates across a void - ‘Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter’ - and it is perhaps finding that ‘voice’ that is so satisfying.
I tend to lean towards the confessional and contemplative, often compelled by the need to make sense of life, loss and complexity, or merely to contain it somewhere. Nature provides an enduring backdrop and the diverse landscape of the Peak District with its wild moorlands and dramatic gritstone edges is a vast and constant source of inspiration.
My poetry has been described as ‘a ludic immersion in the world of words’ alluding to the fascination I have with sonic and linguistic word play. Over time, the essence of spoken word and the aural quality of poetry has captivated me and driven word choice and framing. I think of poetry, like music, as a language of the soul, not just to be read or listened to but to be experienced.
Process is also at the heart of my writing - to wrestle with the idea/theme/thought is often just as time consuming and complex a process as the moulding of the poem itself. It can take days for me to move from mind to paper… the final poem - a small, sculpted conclusion of what started life as something intangible and wild.
Sarah Raybould