Waiting

     For Mark
 
After you died,
someone asked
What was it like
In those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
 
I was not waiting.
 
Wanting, yes. Hoping, yes. For more days.
Finding joy in small things,
a game of camel cup
Your favourite songs
and singing them with you,
reading to you
talking
 
until you could no longer do
any of those things
just sleep
 
And then I watched your breath
entering and leaving a body
that had endured so much and still remained beautiful.
 
 
We locked a circle around you
just as you had asked us to
Your mum, your dad, your brothers,
your best friend.
 
We went with you as far as it was possible to go.
 

Susan Jane Sims

poem published in Ink, Sweat and Tears, January 2025
and shortlisted for their Poem of the Month

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Sunlight in the witness box

Sunlight, do you swear to tell the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but?
 
Yes, I swear.
 
Did you harm Mark?
 
Harm him? No, I warmed him up. I kept his bones strong.
I nourished him with sticky fruit and ripened grains.
 
Did you ever entice him to stay too long within your rays?
Did you beguile him with images of tanned bodies?
Did you tell him this was healthy?
 
Not at all. I never set out to deceive
but it’s hard for me to warn people.
My heat rays fail to burn; it’s my cool ultraviolet rays,
that damage cells.
 
And then the skin sets itself on fire
in its rush to heal its damaged cells
and repair its DNA.
 
I’ll ask again. Sunlight: Do you remember burning Mark?
 
Mark was well protected. His mother made him
and all his siblings wear a hat
with fold down neck guards
and she plastered them all with cream.
 
But I do remember, a rage he got into once
after being burnt. This was after his melanoma
had been found so I don’t feel accountable.
 
I never set out to age his skin or give him cancer.
I sought only to warm. I sought only to nourish.
 
Thank you for your testimony, Sunlight.
You may step down.
 

Susan Jane Sims

in collection Splitting Sunlight, 2019, ISBN 978-1907435799, Dempsey & Windle now Vole Books

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Trees

Holm oak I love your everlasting
canopy of leaves
your miniature acorns.
Oh tree, can you see what the future holds for me?
 
Willow my friend in childhood days,
a place a dreamer could run and hide.
We wept together, oh tree,
for a world we failed to understand.
 
Silver birch, you grace a patch of earth
where salted words were floated
in the wind. Tree of my soul,
you reach for your sky and show me how.
 
Apple tree, my dear, you give of yourself
over and over and over,
and when your limbs are cut,
I cry with you in silent rage.
 
But you oh Pear, you cope with
whatever comes your way. My beloved dead
still bite your fruit and catch
the juice with tongues that come alive.
 

Susan Jane Sims

published in Crouch End Calling,
ed. Anna Maria Mickiewicz, Literary Waves, 2024

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Lady Greensleeves Answers Back

I did not promise you
the future you rehearsed.
I wore what pleased me.
My body stretched on grass,
absorbing the day’s heat,
the earth against my back.
 
You turned me into a ballad,
a sighing refrain.
But I was never your sorrow.
I was a girl in green
with sap on her cuffs,
with wind in her hair,
more than one path before me.
 
The colour fades.
It always does.
Cloth thins.
Songs travel further than the truth.
 

Susan Jane Sims

poem published online at Poetry Space Spring Showcase, 2026

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