Sacha Hutchinson is an eye doctor working in Galway, Ireland. She has a BA in fine art. She writes poetry, attends a weekly poetry class. She enjoys combining words with the visual image and the visual image with words. She has read at the Over The Edge open reading. Her poetry has appeared in Ropes 2018 and in the 2018 spring edition of Skylight 47 and the 2019 autumn edition of The Curlew. She was shortlisted for Poetry for Patients 2018 and 2019. She was longlisted for Over the Edge New Writer of the Year 2018 and shortlisted in 2019.

But Once

I want to tell the girl
Beside me on the train
To go out into the day
Put down the phone
Don’t be sucked in
To the spiral
Of taps and scrolls
 
But she never looks up
Through the window
Hurtling countryside
Sky this blue
Fields of sweet green
Stretches of sunlit sea
Three children wave
Then sleeting rain
Darkens stone and soil
 
I want to shake her
Point and shout
For these things
She will never know
And we pass this way
But once.

Twilight

A golden hour
a just before time
when god speaks
a buffer zone between
night and day, day and night.
 
L’heure bleue, the gloaming
of glitter and glisten
an edge but no fall
just slow suffusion.
 
Light drops
through chinks and cracks
shadows long, shapes soft
wind dies, dew wets.
 
The  time of
hope and patience
then velvet night.
 
With morning, birdsong
a soft new sky
luminous with possibility.
 
To say yes I can
the day is waiting.

The last Eagle

After James Dickey
 
Magisterial, wings two metres wide
bird of ancient civilization
mystic reverence
power passed on by Phoenicians
an Egyptian hieroglyph
perched in our letter ‘a ‘
 
A just surviving dinosaur
amongst Victorian egg collectors
habitat destruction, defamation,
and toxic decimation.
 
The nest, an eyrie
harsh home of sticks
a grisly Cain and Abel story
where one eaglet kills the other.
 
Awe and wonder
as it circles, soars, slips
sweeps our hearts, switchbacks,
summits then plummets
snatches with talons sharp
its poisoned prey, and then…
 
foams, flaps, falls
shrieks with the voice of all nature
I will die, but do not let me
die out.