I WON’T TELL YOU THIS

Nia Broomhall

I am terrified of some soft afterlife

that keeps enough of me, faintly

for something faint and soft to filter through

to you, a fucking feather maybe

 

that keeps enough of me, faintly

to show I’m something there and lost

to you, a fucking feather maybe,

some fucking sense or shadowflake of me

 

to show I’m something there and lost,

and you will search for some shape of me

some fucking sense or shadowflake of me

in a heaven I want no share of,

 

and you will search for some shape of me

where I am fixed in rose light, waiting

in a heaven I want no share of

in the horror of knowing for sure

 

where I am, fixed in rose light, waiting

for something faint and soft to filter through

in the horror of knowing for sure

I am terrified of some soft afterlife.

 

Nia Broomhall won the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2023 and her debut pamphlet, Backalong, was published by Bloodaxe Books in September 2024. She is the current winner of the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Award. Her poetry residency at Painshill Park, an 18th century garden in Cobham, is supported by an Arts Council England DYCP grant. Nia is co-Head of English at a comprehensive school and has been teaching for 23 years. She runs poetry workshops in the community and a successful Poetry Club at her school. Her poems have appeared in Magma, Bad Lilies, The Friday Poem, The Alchemy Spoon, The Interpreter’s House and Ink, Sweat and Tears, and she has twice been Highly Commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize.