Distillation, in snatches: Sarah Leavesley

Congratulations to who has been chosen as the winner of our Welton Walk Competition!

Sarah’s poem ‘Distillation, in snatches’ was inspired by Matthew Welton’s ‘June’ from his collection Small Birds Singing, which you can read here.

Small Birds Singing is a book-length poem of fragments, drawn from a year’s walking through one city’s green spaces. Over the course of twelve months running from September to August, we accumulate hundreds of images drawn from a closely observed daily existence moving between the home and other indoor places, into the green spaces of the modern city.

You can read Sarah’s winning poem below:

Distillation, in snatches:

rain falls almost weight-

less in its touch; summer warmth

at one with my skin

I wade through a field

of waist-high daisies – a sway

of small, white-edged suns

brambles snag my clothes

water seeps in through cracked soles;

my sopping socks mush

numbed feet dragging now

burst clouds slow me to the pace

of laden petals

a few wet dashes

of red – flopping poppies, no

bright tiger-moth flight

where yesterday’s track

was bee buzz & butterflies

slop-slide slippy stiles

skittish, fresh mud daubs

the canal with sludge & snips

of snapped reeds/twigs/leaves

stumbling, I try not

to kick grit or stones into

this new debris bruise

after each downpour

sun re-glosses: the surface

coughs up the sunken sky

held by hedgerow trees

drops of light cling quietly;

tired eyes sparkle blue

shaken loose by wind’s

sighs, to catch next on stinging

nettle barbs – brief gasp –

before dripping back

to earth; in every drop, hopes

for tomorrow’s growth

home, with petrichor

face & fingers, a lingering

sense of being more

alive: hair, head, heart

still trickling, boots wiped, socks wrung –

glimpses of something

deeper pooling on the tiles

Sarah Leavesley/James is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Her latest collections are Darling Blue (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2025), which won the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize 2024, and Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic (Verve Poetry Press, 2022), winner of the CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry 2021 and highly commended in the Forward Prizes. She also runs V. Press, publishing other writers’ poetry and flash fiction.

Website: www.sarah-james.co.uk

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