Sarah Lasoye
Sarah Lasoye is a poet, prison abolitionist and health justice campaigner from London. She is an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets (15/16) and Apples and Snakes ‘The Writing Room’ (18/19). She is currently one of six poets selected for the Apples and Snakes Poetry in Performance 2021-22 programme supported by the Jerwood Arts Development Programme Fund, and a member of Octavia poetry collective for women of colour.
Lands
London, UK
“Healing is reminding myself that time doesn’t work like that, the way I expect, because time doesn’t work.”
Here and now
I spent the day alone and you can bet I started seeing the wind move. I took a long walk through the park with the misty view of the city, and the broken steps leading you down to the stones and the sand and the river.
I started hearing things I’d had on a silencer. The loudest thing said: “Stop fleeing! As if someone must always be wrong and that someone must always be you”
I listened to a child learn about hemispheres, ask - if it is sunny where Aunty is, is it December there too? It's a precious thing, to watch a parent coax a new awe out from their child. The question sticks to me. Is it December there too? If I am here and now, and they are also here and now, then, then
I realised then that my dimensions have been out of balance. For a long while, I have prioritised width over depth. I have feared a sudden hole in the ground and falling into it. I have been the acrobat. Looking out over the audience. Opening my mouth and leaping from a great height. Catching the trapeze, a bar suspended before me, in the grip of my teeth - clamping my jaw shut to pendulum the air like a time keeper.
Healing is reminding myself that time doesn’t work like that, the way I expect, because time doesnt work.
Even today, alone, I cannot write honestly about healing without mention of a long cast list, my tethers and anchors, foils to my self-sabotage plots, a carousel of counsellor-loves. I suppose one form of healing is when you’re able to say something only for yourself and see the soft ball of you and your said thing (patterned, blood red and cobalt blue) cushioned into the palms of another. This dialogue-form is a balance, of such practice and grace, that the two of you feel like the skater and like the ice.
Here and now, abandon and commitment are dovetailing recklessly. I make a promise to myself, to cook for my friends and ask if we can learn something new together. Each of us will measure out only so much as each of us are able to hold.
One day alone makes clear the task of relation. It feels like pressing your tight forehead against a cold surface. The pain and the release of new intention.
I owe many people many things. If I’ve forgotten what I owe you, please accept my apology. Right now all I have on me is this.
Before anything, I am an instrument in service of love. If there’s something I can’t ask myself, I know I can glean it from you - cold park bench, cornflower sky, fluttering river water - you can ask for me, and something deep will answer.