The Poetry of Maria Heath

Photograph courtesy of Maria Heath

---

Maria Heath’s poetry, essays, and autobiographical writing have been published by Torriano Poets, Nirala Publications, Strand International, Lakeview, and George Whitman at Shakespeare and Company. She holds a Masters in Fiction Writing (with Distinction) from Royal Holloway, University of London, and is currently working toward a doctorate in Creative Non-Fiction at King’s College, London. Having grown up in York, Maria credits an exposure to her home city’s gothic folklore as the stimulus that first sparked her imagination, together with a surrounding landscape of ruined abbeys, moorlands, and dramatic coasts. With a degree in Fine Art from Chelsea, University of the Arts London, as well as a Theology degree, Maria loves visual art as much as writing. This is a passion reflected in her love of photography and filmmaking. Since moving to London a few years ago, Maria has performed there and at Oxford literary salons. She has participated as a speaker at the Himalayan Literature Festival in Nepal and at conferences held at The Royal College of Psychiatrists. Maria’s work has been commended and shortlisted in competitions held by Mothers’ Milk Books and Strands International.

Sudeep Sen, Poetry & International Editor

Nativity

The light beam shining above Bloomsbury
seems sent from elsewhere.
When you wake,
I hold you to my secret breast.
I watch you suck.
I sing to you,
my mother’s songs,
sweet lullabies I cannot forget.

When the light filters in through the grainy picture
in the window of the ward, and the sky unblackens,
the colour of pale blue ash,
I kneel in the bath, taps full on,
washing away the spots of blood,
drowning the sting,
in gushes of pink-tinged water like
a woman at a village spring.

The midwife brings a clean
gown. And I’m clean
as the baby beside,
as a sea-washed pebble of glass,
washed up on the unfamiliar shore
of a post-natal ward like flotsam
too far
from home.

One day old,
you screw your eyes up
at the artificial light, sleep
behind the perspex of your crib.
I feel my womb,
an empty church,
blood stains on my bed,
a glass of milk.

---

Motherhood

You,
in my arms,
drinking,
soft sweet gulps,
sweet nectar,
your limpet mouth,
your kitten
tongue.

In the studio,
alizarin crimson
paint on the palette,
a dark red dye, oozing
from poppy oil
and turps.
On the canvas,
a still mark.

I wait
for you to cry.
It is too quiet,
this painting.
I watch you
breathe.

---

Baby Sings with Angels

You watch the sky you cannot name,
your arms, pink wing stubs feathering my chest.
The sky to me, bright as flaming tulle, flecked
with crows; to you a nameless space

where you surrender to an unknown breeze,
and begin to sing,
words as if brought in
from elsewhere, overseas —

snatches of angelic
tunes I’ve never heard
before that start to seem familiar
as ancient shanties

sound to sailors far at sea
learning how to rig the sails,
read the tides, rig and bail,
to stay afloat, above the deep —

meanwhile garden roses
thread their fragile scent
through leaves the nameless shades of amber resin
through October wood smoke,

spiraling
from little bonfires,
dotted on the slopes of Dulwich woods, pyres
of unwanted things

making space,
for new,
singed petals cupping drops of dew-
like rain.

---

Lisbon

Small and hungry as a baby bird,
you wake me with your little cry, the curtains
in the window of the hotel room blowing,
old as flimsy petticoats; your skin
a fabric of torn light; time
elusive as the shifting patterns dappling the bareness
of whitewashed walls; the wood floor, scattered
with baby things.

I dress you in a romper suit, a tiny yacht
appliquéd on — port-holed, flagged —
your legs, rebellious, pushing through the gathering
of cotton, kicking out. Your
miniature, balled-up fists punching at the air,
with the vigor of a dancer.
You, a fighter without opponent, a boy
delighted with his unseen performance.

Later, by the Teijo, we are scraps of light,
barely there,
just random assemblages of colour and atom,
a shimmer of existence, a sparkle of pink
and gold as fragments fallen
from someone’s kaleidoscope,
far from home,
out of view.

---

Train Ride out of Arles

August sunflowers, already dead,
fields of them burned in this terrible heat,
fading cusps, dry as scorched paper.

We are silent as those gilded flowers,
as though we posed too long for each other’s art.
As though there’s nothing more to say.

Inside the exhausted fabric of my parched flesh,
the child I bear, gold and secret as a dark seed,
my hidden embryo, like a trace of paint.

The points of the cypresses pierce
the aqua sky like the tips of sable brushes, the clouds
flowering time and time again,

then the train penetrates those languorous fields,
timelessly bronzed, the blades of a helicopter,
hospital-tile white, thrashing at the sun,

the train, pushing on through the poplars strung up with wire,
metallic pylons straddling quiet groves, giants
in fairy-tale books, motorway queues, shiny as snakes,

passengers playing on gadgets, André reading Guattari’s
Three Ecologies, a blur of marginalia meandering across the text,
his face a shimmer of sunlight and shade,

as he makes away down the aisle with a pre-rolled
cigarette in mouth, to the smoker’s carriage
at the other end, whilst I wait, quiet as the baby in utero.

---

Out of London

The muslin sheet floats on moss pillows.
The ancient soil of the hillside cradles our bed.

On the terracotta slopes above the Mediterranean,
the bells of tiny churches ring like the music of another age,
chiming through the atonal hum of cicadas,

as abundances of rosemary flicker with butterflies,
moonshine wings quiet as paper.

Gazing skywards the children ask,
What are those scraps of light?
Those shards of glass?

The sky floats out like an indigo kite
beyond the bars of a Mondrian painting.

The constellations dazzle our eyes,
like splintered light on flick-knife blades,
stars like glitter-ball eyes.

Fountains-du-Vaucluse

---

Reflection

for Rosabel

In the garden, we water the same plants,
the same blood flowing through veins,
as though one river runs through us both.
Our hands, like chalices, bear the fruit
of one harvest
as we wander home from the hills.

Together we watch the moths flutter,
wings buzzing on bulb.
Hear the waves washing pebbles
in the same blue dawn,
lapping through this shared holiday room.

Our thoughts, our perceptions,
start to echo between.

Later, you bring ideas from other lives,
other mirrors, like new blood
transfused into the circuitry of our veins.

I begin to build a house, in accordance
to your design; removing bad habits
like heirlooms that stand in the way.

When I cry, you will sing me the lullaby
I sang to you in your crib. And tell the stories we wove
from all the threads collected from other pasts.

You will take my hand, when I am blind, so I
feel the breeze
and picture the sail of the dawn boat.
Here it is always summer.
The garlands you weave never die.

You are my egg,
my reflection,
all that I could be.

— Machynlleth, Mid Wales