Three poems

By Nicola Healey

August Dawn

    5.24 to 6.10 a.m.

When it starts to melt, in the quiet hour,

there is a milkiness 

as though cloudlets lay under a silk screen.

The sun’s first gleams,

second by second,

dissolve the dim light as a solvent restores a painting.

Horizon stretches up

from pink to aquamarine to powder blue to sky 

with the clarity of water.

A high half moon, still in its night glow, 

a broken mother-of-pearl button,

as near and sudden as the hot-air balloon below,

spectral and suspended.

A robin tick ticks through the willow at the unseen prowler 

as foot soles absorb cool damp paving stone,

heavy with the night and the dew.

Mists swamp the distance, sheet webs over grass,

and shorn wheat fields wait.

A red kite streaks across the stillness with a commuter’s intent.

After St Andrews

‘People and things pass away, but not places.’

                        – Daphne du Maurier

I knew every angle of street. 

Every mood 

of the sky and the sea

was laid down in me

across a decade’s shape;

a settling into place

of particles of being.

Even the auld grey stone 

I felt warmly.

All that places are 

is what you are, and your nearest.

A place moves on 

and doesn’t welcome you back.

Home is really the sedimentary

accrual of soul, or self, in space, 

for even prisons and hospitals 

cast this spell.

You will be greeted 

with an uncanny air: intimate 

but closed.

Every footstep raises a ghost.

Loved places blank you 

at every turn, like a disowning friend. 

There are houses, whole cities, I can’t visit.

Seeing a place thrive 

beyond you

is a revelation of the afterlife: 

you are already dead here.

Oxford

‘Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead.’

– T. S. Eliot, in a letter to Conrad Aiken, 31st December 1914

If I visit, I see ghosts down every street.

I move on, but they emerge out of the cold 

Corallian stone of this brainy city.

Its surfeit of beauty was wasted on me. 

Even the sky hung aloof like a psychiatrist.

But the view from South Park, with its ragged spires 

and intelligent mists, rising in the dusk;

the distant hum of endeavour and history,

held in suspense, couldn’t be refuted. 

Sometimes, right when you think it’s the end

of your life, the world emits life,

almost as if it wants to save you, damn it. 

But where a life has been razed, a ghost remains. 

A place can never be in the present again.

Nicola Healey's poems, essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Hopkins Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine and Wild Court, among other places. She was a runner-up in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry 2020, and longlisted for the inaugural Nature Chronicles Prize 2021/22. 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. She is currently based in Buckinghamshire.