Sarah Westcott
Sarah Westcott comes from north Devon. She now lives
in Blackheath, south London, with her partner and two
small children. Sarah has a science degree and has
lived in Bristol, Brighton and Moscow where she taught
English as a foreign language. She has been a journalist
since 1998 and currently works as a news reporter and
editor for the Daily Express. She has always enjoyed
the written word and the natural world and their various
intersections and is particularly interested in the
emerging field of ecocriticism.
Her short fiction has been published in Aesthetica, Poetry
News, The Interpreter’s House, The New Writer, Mslexia,
The Guardian and The Guardian on-line, Obsessed with Pipework
and various anthologies. She finishes Andrew Motion and Jo
Shapcott’s creative writing MA at Royal Holloway later
this year and has written a dissertation on flood poetry
in an ecocritical context, drawing on the work of Maurice
Riordan, Ted Hughes and Maura Dooley.
Oxygen
We took it in together:
planes banking on tiers of sky,
and underneath two cabbage whites
tying knots in the air,
later the pipistrelle,
its carved figure of eight,
petals on the closing daisy,
lashes round the ox’s eye,
later still the moth,
its ragged orbit still its own
around its own hot sun
and binding this our blood,
its start and finish, its brilliance,
the give-and-take
and give of oxygen.
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited