Sara Barnard | A summer visit to the Great North Museum in Newcastle Upon Tyne with my child and a heart full of headlines | Poets Resist

Sara Barnard (she/her) is from the UK, has lived in Spain and Canada, and is now based on a sailboat (currently in Central America) with her husband, child, and laptop for company. The last few years have mainly been about parenting and PhDing. She has recently had work accepted by Bone & Ink Press, Hypertrophic Literary, and Ink & Nebula.

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Poets Resist
Edited by Krista Cox
July 30, 2018

Sara Barnard

A summer visit to the Great North Museum in Newcastle Upon Tyne with my child and a heart full of headlines

They covered up the Romans with lime green banners flagged like soldiers. The wall was hidden, too. You could almost think it had never been there at all, but we remembered from before. Bones were duller than the screen where a digital dinosaur roared. You were scared of that noise, but went back, once, twice, again to check. It’s complicated, natural history. I wanted you to love the old things in boxes. Drawers pulled out to reveal crystals, amethysts, fool’s gold. The bones and bowls of soily years. A swallow, caught in flight. Only Hirst’s Heaven paused us both, multiplied you, held faces suspended in the pickling blue. Tick tock tick tock said grandpa later, clock in hand as he tried to explain time. I learned it today picking redcurrants in the garden. I was on Twitter, you were on the grass prickle in your foot, wiping snot and salt around your face as I watched another moment disappear in the fruit’s sun-glow. So time is this. And time is asking: How long does a mother wait? How many leaves fall while a child cries? How long is too long without each other to clean those reddened fingers, pick out the thorn? Dinosaur, wall, garden, cage. They are all an age. All ways to learn not one of us escapes its hold, the march of days and years, the stories, the lies.