Poetry by Sarah DesRosiers-Legault

The Cave

Its belly decorated by hundreds of
silken strands, like ivory beads that
pour down past the scalloped rim
of a flapper girl’s dress.

But these ones stay still. They don't
sway over warm thighs, they hang in
the empty. Waiting. They belong to the
worms. Lines set, Their glowing bodies
become a canopy. A pretend galaxy that
coats the limestone ceiling, one they own.

They beckon for the lost.
Midges or mayflies, they see no different
and the lost see only perfect pearls
that dangle from stars. With one touch
they're taken, eaten alive.
They took me too, and sometimes
I still call them beautiful.


*Poem inspired by the episode Caves from Planet earth.


​

Stuck

I stare out the window at
the hovering, for needled
beaks to meet nectar,
but bodies so still. Maybe dead
for a moment, wings
blurred by eyes not meant to
see them.

I think of all the eyes
not meant to see me.
When I was five I learnt how to
leave my body.
Now I seem to have a hard time
staying. Sometimes, I get stuck
in the hovering.




Night Bugs

My oars thick and stubborn,
never agreeing. They can’t see
the moon light like a ribbed silk
cloth sewn to the lake. My oars
can only feel the damp and
the splitting. The bats are the same,
clumsy and forgetting. Nipping
only for night bugs.
Their wings, tissue stretched over
bone still carry them.
There is no quiet in their hunt.
All while silver bodies leap from
home. They drink the air, it does
nothing for them. I am no better,
when all I can do is judge the way
the lake keeps my boat in between.




Enough

I sit in the spot like I do every night I am up here; in the rumble under the stitching of this space.
This tiny world is blistered around me, the static from outside like blips of morse code knocking
on thick skin.  My chair is made of logs, greying moss webbed over the spaces in between. The
swell of now, I will wear it as muscle. It will be enough for a while, until my body again turns to
need. Behind me, in the woods, there is darkness in the snapping, a question, a blank. Where my
face glows, the moths try to eat the sparks from the fire before they get sucked into stars. A chase
for the stuffings in the thick smoke that washes them down. A kind of packing where nothing
dies for now.




The Work

I Wheelbarrow over twigs for the
snapping and over the roots that, like moss
holds onto my bare feet, wrap around the
stones of my trail. I fight with gentle, my

fingers cluttered over the rusting makes
one big body that bellows through. Here, I
can see all the stars. I bury them in
sky so deep I could never belong to

them. I was meant to come back with a sturdy
warm. Instead I collect stiff bark and the
longest needled pine I can find. Because
I prefer things that crackle over flame,

things that can’t keep me but instead scream all
that is wrong with me. Somehow I stay here.

​

Bio: Sarah is a twenty-one-year-old student studying English and Creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal. She is a never-before-published poet. Most of her work takes its inspiration from nature, whether it be her cottage in Quebec or her grandparent’s home in Grand Barachois, New Brunswick. She has found art and a connection with nature to be her primary healers. When there is a fusion of the two that is when she feels most whole.

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