for Sarah
Ten weeks for a breast scan, now twelve. The mind is prose and will wander. Here on the range, with an IV cannula hanging from the crook of my arm, the floor changes across
the hours, a Rolodex of sunlights. Nothing is like it was: people full of holes in schools, a
slip-road McDonald’s, fake parmesan in a shaker, trash collectors on strike, watermelon balanced
on a gate post wet with early. In the parking lot, a woman grips her hospital gown tight at the
neck and stares across
the boulevard at Exxon forecourt, at bright blue hydrangeas priced to sell. Rainbow golf
umbrella, blown inside-out, tucks
its face in the neck of the overpass. On Elm Road, scrub pines grow as a vote to live big. Can
anything be fixed? This is the doubting disease. I am in and out of this, in
and almost out. I am home telescope pointed at the moon skipping light years if nudged
sideways. You make the world seem safer
than it is: fat heirloom tomatoes, sea salt in a sandwich bag, chocolate in bright wrappers from
American airports. Two blocks over,
six o’clock Amtrak hares down the straight line to Newark, life-sized and picketing. Dawn amber
swelling box carts empty of lumber, day rising
like a kite shaking its tail, an act of faith.
Dawn Watson
Dawn Watson is from Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the author of We Play Here (Granta Poetry). A Guardian Poetry Book of the Year, it was shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2024 and the John Pollard International Poetry Prize. Dawn’s work appears in journals such as The Poetry Review, and on BBC Radio 4. She completed a PhD in poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, and is a creative writing professor at Queen’s University.
