The Watcher

One for sorrow. Two for mirth. Three for a funeral. Four for a birth. Five for heaven. Six for hell. Seven for the watcher himself.

This poetry collection follows a girl and a magpie The Watcher, bound together across a lifetime of loss, tenderness, cruelty, and care.

Rooted in the traditional magpie rhyme, these seven poems unfold as a modern myth. The girl grows through grief, memory, protection, and love, while the Watcher bears witness: from hospital rooms and funerals, through childhood dens and first flights, into heaven's seductive illusions and hell's inherited violence.

The Watcher is not a guide.
He is not a saviour.
He watches because he must.

Moving between the visceral and the lyrical, the domestic and the divine, this collection explores girlhood, trauma, faith, inheritance, and survival. It asks what it means to witness suffering without the power to speak, and whether love, repeated quietly over time, can be enough.

The final poem turns the gaze inward, offering a reckoning not of judgment, but of rest.

This book is for readers drawn to poetry that feels like folklore, work that lingers and roots itself in the body, that trusts symbol over explanation, and that understands that growing up is not a straight line, but a series of reckonings counted carefully, one by one.

Seven poems.
One watcher.
A life measured in omens.