by Dawn Sands
So this is how it ends,
grey sea morphing into grey sky, horizon
a thin balance beam today, white ice sun
rays skirting behind clouds & there is the
tornado, does anybody know what it is?
We’ll be standing on greyscale pebbles
bunched together, a row of fading trainers drained
of light. I think your face will be too gaunt to
laugh or otherwise you would, the irony of it,
really, because at the hospital they scooped you
into tubes and tapped out your life
on a screen, moulded your soul back together
until you were well & now there is
this. What actually is it, though? It’s all
I can think and if I asked myself as a six-year-old
she would know, or she’d believe she knew —
God, at least it is me and not her, or she’d be frozen
skeletal to the bed whispering
her final confessions into the night & hoping
the wind is strong enough to carry her
to heaven. She thought in heaven they slept
in purple sleeping bags. Anyway,
now I see it, column-vortex choreography
spinning and spouting between sky and sea like a
Grecian pillar holding up the heavens. I remember you
telling me what a frieze was aged six,
and it is us and it is Pompeii and it is silent suspension
& probably I should be worried about
pyroclastic flow but I am giddy
and I think if we were filming this
we’d laugh years later.
I suppose we still could. It is only
a warning. The shape of it
is always something that has pulled the soles
from my feet. Let us stand here, in a line,
with no tornado, so that perhaps when the day comes
this is the frieze we will be locked in, & please sit
me down and tell me how it functions
before the day it kills us in our sleep.
lament from a foreign shore
Dawn Sands (she/her) is a 17-year-old writer currently focusing on poetry, but she has also written a novel and is working on a weird novella that spans 7000 years and several instances of humans finding beauty wherever they can. She was a Top 15 winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2023, and you can find her on Instagram @dawnllsbooks.