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.
