Sara Stegen - Issue 35

Sara Stegen is a Dutch poet, equity advocate, and non-fiction author who writes about family, neurodivergence, and the landscape she lives in. Sara is a mother of two neurodivergent sons: a black belt lockpicker and a Dutch bike trial athlete. She is a member of the Poetry Society Germany Stanza group. Sara has an MA in English from the University of Groningen and is a 2022 Rural Writing Institute alumnus, a retreat run by best-selling authors Kathryn Aalto (Writing Wild, The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh) and James Rebanks (The Place of Tides, English Pastoral, A Shepherd’s Life). Home is a boulder-clay ridge in the northern Netherlands where her bike shed contains eight bicycles and where she works on a memoir about apples and autism and her first poetry collection. Sara works for Research Centre Art&Society, Hanze.

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New carpet trees

Do you want larch

needles or yellow leaves?

This winter for a carpet

I can supply the trees

Leaving the nest once again, can I not – yet, please

Six months, seven nearly.

Housebound bubble slowed down.

Out of the working world –

I walked – 

too much time

just write and sit in the sun.

Walk too much.

Arm in sling.

Too much time – gone.

Six months, seven nearly

is too little time,

I find.

I don’t want to go

out there after all this time.

This here is fine.

I love the quietness of my life.

Tell me, please:

Can I be housebound,

a little longer, please.

Be together with the boys.

Freeze time please,

the world, work-life balance, please.

The ease, pretty please.

Stay here – stay-at-home – work

Stay-at-home – love – please.

I need you in my days, please.

I am a house martin

trying to get over my unease,

flying out into the world again

which I can, I hope I can make

my own – once again. 

Please.

One house martin is in search

of a work home, please.

Lit

Looking through my old course books,

each page – a semester, a year

of knowledge gained.

Threads of my history.

Grammar, phonetics, law,

Old and Middle English,

English and American lit.

All knowledge that

a fire lit.