Jeremiah ‘Sugar J’ Brown is a Croydon-based poet. He is a Barbican Young Poet, a member of Spit The Atom poetry collective and one of the faces of Nationwide’s Voices ad campaign. He has been commissioned by St Paul’s Cathedral and Totally Thames.
Email: sugarjpoet@gmail.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sugarjpoet/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sugarjpoet
Website: https://sugarjblog.wordpress.com/
She cut herself out of this darkness, a square of jaundice brightness washing over bedsheets and cupboard doors and brunette bundles stretched out over white cliffed shoulders.
In her mirror, chest beats out into the night sea, a sonar call, a declaration that windows aren’t boxes, that round things don’t live in squares.
Light is like a calling, but just because you followed it, doesn’t mean you belong there.
I am often told to listen
for God in nature,
that the heavens
declare his glory,
that the skies
proclaim
the work of his hands.
A fat, furry loaf of a dog
barks at a seagull.
As the gull flies
so the dog follows,
an unleavened hound
trying so hard
to offer itself up.
Begging to live
in the belly of the sky.
We laugh,
as if we don’t break bread
every week
in communion,
trying to get closer
to God’s sun.
