Nebulae & Salt

I couldn’t bear then
to try it on, this thing;
I knew and I know, I’d have lost myself,
swathed in metaphors I hadn’t yet tasted

because I was still
seasonless, waiting
for drunken dawns and sublime solecism – the grit
and sting of honesty.

Spring came
with the dripping thaw of
unfolding I ams, and there
I was and wasn’t, all at once,
a wide-eyed coma.

Then I strangled summer,
squeezed its neck between pale knuckles, and the bloodstains
on my nails
were a simmering oil slick,
sunset red.

But here is the harvest;
autumn now, southward
of birthing days,
and there’s that thing again, begging me
to give it limbs, to slip it over my head and fill it up

like a throat full of song.

So I’ll fill it
with songs, and dirges,
with nebulae and salt,

I’ll let it hold hands with my shadows
and say the words I cannot.

Seanín Hughes is an emerging poet and writer from Cookstown, Northern Ireland, where she lives with her partner and four children. Despite writing for most of her life, Seanín only began to share her work in late 2016 and since then, she has been working on an ever-increasing volume of new poetry.