Hélène Demetriades

i rise to higher altitudes

because long ago, a butterfly stuck stamp-like
to the oily nectar of mother’s
still life, a vase of peonies still wet
from the brush. The fritillary gasped,
shed wings — a cricket hopped out of the canvas.

Because only yesterday, a nurse held
a bottle of oxygen to my dead mother’s lips,
and her bronchioles opened
like pink-feathered seaweed combed
by the ocean, bringing her back to this life.

Because the resurrection was a phlegm
that flooded my lungs and winged cavities,
and I took the nurse’s keys to drive up the mountains
where the star-shaped Edelweiss breathe.

Hélène Demetriades has been longlisted in The National and twice highly commended in the International Fool for Poetry Chapbook Award. Her debut collection The Plumb Line was published in 2022 by Hedgehog Press. She was winner of The Silver Wyvern, Poetry On The Lake, 2022, and has been placed equal fourth in the Kent & Sussex poetry competition, 2025. Her poems have been published in Magma, The Marrow, Harana, Lighthouse Journal, Finished Creatures, The Alchemy Spoon, and Ink, Sweat & Tears, amongst others.

Hélène wrote the following about her poem:

This poem is based on two dreams I had twenty years apart from each other, one years before my mother's death, the other some years after.  As they both carry the same energetic signature, they were finally merged across time into one poem!