A fresh, new, and powerful voice in poetry, Katie Jones offers a morning poem, awakening on a very human world desperately imposing itself on natural orders. “I wrote this poem after reading a lot of Sarah Kirsch and thinking about the ways in which we are embedded in the natural world – it’s an attempt to recognise the tendency to try to control the world around us and suppress the limits of our ability to exert power,” Katie told The Dewdrop. “You’ll notice Keats’ influence in my poetic exploration of solastalgia, ecological crisis and the boundaries between the literary and so-called ‘un-literary’.”
Morning
Heavens, the day really did come!
I felt sure it wouldn’t – it was still
so dark as we stumbled
along jogging to the pulse of habit –
too much to imagine the sun’s blaze
but it came
petroleum spells cast
us into half-light – the stars
still visible as we passed
the lit tree
twinkling LEDs
with an idea of Christmas
gift mountains
revelations of gold red green paper
plastic pine needles…
our shoes pounding rhythmically
each moment marked
Lord, it was cold!
my fingers numb
your lips blue
tarmacadam glittering
dangerously – and you warned me
to be careful
not to fall
and I wished to have known
you as a babe swaddled
to have held you at the beginning
by the time we dutifully
turned
it was light
we remarked
upon the unlit tree
the browning sea
churning before
the steel works
the buzz and jolt of a wrist watch
announcing time for work time
to forget the morning
to forget the weather
to forget the warmth of your body
Katie Jones
Katie Jones is a new poetic voice. She is a literary scholar interested in women’s life writing, self-representation and loss.