Marion Tracy: a poem

The Sleeper

What can she see behind her eyelids,

is it rapid skies, galaxies on fire?

Can she hear voices on the other side

of the ward, our footsteps

light and fearful?

With folded arms and a puzzled

frown, how distant

she looks, moving away from us

as if she were a bird,

asleep on the wing,

half of her brain shut down,

or a child of spacemen travelling

for generations unable to remember

what she was trying to find.

Marion Tracy has two degrees in English Literature and was a lecturer in colleges of Further Education. She lived in Australia for seven years, where she started writing poetry. She is widely published in magazines and previously published a pamphlet Giant in the Doorway (HappenStancePress 2012). She lives in Brighton. You can find out more about here here.