Midsummer’s Eve
by and published in Edition Seven of Pomegranate
Once, when the sun looked a little bit younger,
we lay on the ground, watching beetles
and going to seed with the grass.
My ice-lolly fingers were melting on skin,
stained sticky and red, and our toes
trailed runes in the dust, making tracks
for the plundering ants.
That night we walked to the sea, dark and
sticky as tar, and the men set fire to a boat.
I watched the blue paint while it blistered, and
wide-eyed, I listened to worm-wooded beams
as they screamed for the seawater,
coughing up embers like stars,
to replenish the night, you said, to
make up for the ones that were dying
in places we’d never be able to see.
The air burned our eyes, and you told me
the sand might melt from the heat;
I imagined the beach made of wax,
and dripping, into the salt of the sea.
Next morning, we looked for the place
where the stones had been scorched, and saw
just a skeleton left of a boat; a carcass
picked clean by the gulls.
Sophie Stephenson-Wright
Sophie Stephenson-Wright is a 17 year old student who will be (hopefully) studying Biological Sciences at Oxford next year. She was a commended Foyle Young Poet in 2007, and a winner in 2008. She is a crazy person at heart, but shhhh…don’t tell anyone…