The poetic landscapes of Natalie Crick mix earthy with transcendental, creating a space for reading in broad silences, but with vibrant expectations for what will be unveiled. As in, for example, "the lick of the wind on the cliff"... and many more instances we hope you will uncover in the five poems below.
Natalie Crick, from the UK, has found delight in writing all of her life and first began writing when she was a very young girl. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in a range of journals and magazines including Rust and Moth, The Chiron Review, Ink in Thirds, Interpreters House and The Penwood Review. Her work also features or is forthcoming in a number of anthologies, including Lehigh Valley Vanguard Collections 13. This year her poem, "Sunday School" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Ocean Voice
The night is dying,
Morning merely mist.
Clouds remains silent
About their loss.
We cross frontiers
So easily that we mistake
Heaven for blue sky.
My voice was blind, grayed,
Unheard,
Rolling like a nightingale into song.
The ocean still haunts,
It’s salt embedded
In our skin.
Graveyard in November
It is early November.
Rafters and stained glass glow
In candlelight and
The eulogy crackles from the pulpit
Like frost over oak leaves.
Each snow flurry marks another
Melted year. Gone and forgotten.
The ghost trees hover.
I watch their sucked-out leaves
Rotting with moss and mildew.
Dried, dead.
The gleaming grave
Stands like a door
Without handle or hinge,
It’s only pathway through the soil.
One touch turns me to stone.
Landscape
At windows geraniums blow kisses
To the gusty surge of trees,
The winter bleak, the sky lucid.
Lonely. Empty.
Ball of moon glitters
In dead of night,
Throat married to tongue,
Tongue to landscape,
The lick of the wind on the cliff
Your own precipice,
The wind’s voice
In this high place,
The nearness of clouds
To the sea.
It sounds when it’s dark
Like a song:
Waves froth and gleam like electricity,
A perfect bowl of black that seals the eyes.
Aphrodite came out of these waters.
A stone
In a lost lake
Still has it’s own sunrise.
Through Bitter Eyes
Maple branches etch
An ink blue moon.
The sky opens it’s banners like lips,
Azure tapestries furled back into stratus clouds.
Petals lost to wind
Will blanket the ground.
Dew on rust
Will run like dried blood.
Sunflower doll heads bob.
Eternal weavers work their
Silver looms,
A fragile menace
Spooling a ghost bridge.
My bitter eyes are marbles
Stolen from orphans.
Ocean Moon
Night long we lie,
Two heads in a womb,
Warm and close,
The taste of ice on the tongue
Liquid cool
Coals to crack teeth.
Moon;
Heaven’s plaything,
Melts from a lover’s lantern
Down to a sliver, a whisper,
Leaving behind her glitter,
Her jewels.
Wish by wish
She fattens on a diet of dreams,
Ripe and wet,
Drawing closer to the frothing seas
Before lurching away.
An ascending pearl
Swallowed by fog.
