I was far from the chalky soil of my youth
A naked Autumn crocus,
left to face the winter of the next ten years.
A painted almost lady, pale and sickly, like milk-parsley.
Knapweed always ready to tangle my thighs.
Ragged robin red breast turned nightshade crow.
Is living an act of undoing the knot of our fate, or can it never be fully undone?
You cleared the cobwebs,
a cold lake for a brain which I was never afraid to dive in.
My heart was always shouting a little too quietly.
The lake always lapped it a little too late.
A two headed admiral, obscured by the wings of your bed sheet.
A reincarnation of the child I used to be,
then from our chests grew wild and blossoming violets.
Standing, my half moon shield.
The green that was grey for a day too long made me melt.
Does nobody stop to look at moss?
I’ll fold in on my Self as I loose my seemed health
Seed sprouts, shoots and returns. I didn’t know that from the start.
So long as the Universe still dances and twirls,
The infinite firsts of July’s will always revive me.
Natasha Emily Lynch
Natasha Emily Lynch is a visual artist whose interchanges between language and image immerse the reader in the pictures of her reality. Within Journeys on Land and Sea, the captivating interplay between her work’s visual and textual elements echo the tensions between the static and expansive capacities of her poetic voice. The paintings function as an introduction, a reflection, and an ending to the seed-like words sewn into the text while the lingering luminosity of paint leads towards forms of epiphanic insight in the collection as a whole. Between October 2020 and October 2022, she spent time between Lancashire and Fleinvær, Northern Norway, where ideas of place and self have been separated, entangled and explored in depth.
OSMOSIS PRESS 