BEHIND THE SCENES
Poetry By
Nathan Steward
Nathan Steward is an emerging writer, studying English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter while he works on his novel. He has successfully participated in writing competitions for several years; chosen as a finalist in the HG Wells Short Story Competition, shortlisted for the Young Walter Scott Fiction Prize and commended twice in the Writers of the Future Contest.
He is the recipient of the 2025 Creative Future Writer's Bronze Award for Poetry, as well as the first-place winner of the InFocus Short Story Competition 2022. He has been paid to write and perform his poetry at public Exeter events and recently completed a three-month UNESCO creative commission.
In Passing Anthology
Childhood
Great, looping brush strokes,
lines and clots and impressions;
these are what define the early hours
of the early days – a mouth,
wide and formless and dilating –
sounding out secrets with a lyric lip,
or the periphery of a finger
and its grooves – rivers and channels
in my grasp – that grip,
the search and clasp which
I only now realize
was me.
That mouth becomes a mother,
that finger grows a father,
and both wag and wave with fresher clarity
as I rub the womb-sleep from my lids
and step toward my first sunrise
in the cavities between the pines
which leer beyond the fence.
Pain is a funny thing – that comic thud
when I ricocheted from the swing
and thumped my skull on the tarmac.
It tastes sweet to cry – to split the atom
and open my nose and eyes and let
four rivers run from Eden into the grit
and finally remember the taste of buttercups,
cut and tilled between my baby teeth,
gold, lard-light on my chin.
After all, it is tough to chew a childhood
when each day brings a new bite
of cloudscapes and smile-shine
and on its plush breeze, sails a leaf
as thin and fine and wise as the palm
of a grandparent; whose smile is a valley,
whose promises are a mountain, who knows
the same song and lets you stumble
into friendship, fury, joy and love –
all uniformed and pomped
and smiling on your first day
of school.
- By Nathan Steward
Adolescence
Later, I remember the music
that felt like I swallowed a firework;
all colour and noise with those early friends
who revealed the sound of a shared song
can make for such sweeter symphonies.
Blood can be thicker than water, yet
vodka and cigarette ash and the mud
on my boot are a heavier root
and tighter towline – stapling me
to the tempo – nothing makes
for a prettier picture
than that inaugural love –
the kiss under a neon moon;
the footsteps of the heart dashed
across the hand in Cupid’s glove.
Revelation rides consummation
and I become a piece
or a raindrop or a thread,
wrapped and drowning
in some larger tapestry – a bullet
in my father’s gun, a slice
in my mother’s meal;
the first and last
commandment of youth
is discovering that
I can be young at all.
But why be concerned about becoming small?When we can be tiny together and plunge
back into the haze. Sometimes, being a person
can’t be traded in sober words
and is only discovered in the mad waggle
and assertion of movement: that bold dance –
those chuckles and jabs –
the hammering and the chanting
and the tongue-thwacking rhythm
of surfing yet another wave
in humanity’s pounding sprawl.
Adulthood
So, now get up.
There is still beauty in the black and chrome
when framed in gold, and
there is still fire and levity
in a mirrored glance
and the clean gasp
of an early morning.
So, now get up.
Wake up and walk out
of that flimsy membrane, screwing
your limbs to the sheets. Bolt
those thoughts and remember,
always, to bring your armour
to face the circles
which drag and twirl and pull us
like a spiral or a dream
into hello’s, goodbye’s, how are you’s –
interrupted only by a familiar ringtone,
or a sight, or the smell of a memory
of a kiss in a staccato smog. And
the alarm;
the same tinny, modern chime
which has shattered every golden moment
since two rocks collided
and spat out an Earth.
I see the same people –
the same concrete and plastic starsand cosmic wrappers. Yet,
boredom is not discovered
in the sticky repetitions
or knowledge of that orbit
but only when it stops
and there is a gap
the length of a lifetime,
or a raindrop – the slow fall
until once more,
you steel your faculties
and button your dream
and now and forever
get up.
Old Age
Great, looping songs and
every colour and every clot
make just another trophyglowing on the wall.
But why should I get up?
Everything is here, in my fingertips;
stacked on grooves and wisdom lines.
The whole of existence in the stretch
of a ligament, the blossom of time
running across my palm.
I’ve slowed my beat and learnt
to love the circles – I roll them now
on the tip of my tongue:
blood and buttercups and sugar smiles
and there will always be photographs;
pink morsels of memory.
They ask me now, if I have become acquainted
with death and its dealings
and I smile at the absurdity;
with every purl and cable of my needle
my mother holds my hand – with every tap
of my slipper to this cadence
I know I am not alone – after all,
there is still this melody
and there – still –
is me.