Sara Poems

From Lullabye

There is no music
For the song
I never thought to write.
Your sleep that came
Too soon has left me
Silenced in the night.


From Without

I ran through the forest
Under its flickering canopy of green
I ran with the snow
Stinging in my eyes.
I could hear you calling me,
urging me on.
I ran and ran
til the sea ran out of land
I ran and I ran
I ran after you

But I could not catch up.

On Good Friday 2000, the 23 year old student Sara Cameron was murdered while walking home late at night to the village of Earsdon. It was a crime that shocked North Tyneside and the country in general. The high profile investigations lasted four years before the killer was brought to justice, and given a life sentence.

On the day of sentencing, Sara''s father, Roy Cameron began to write a remarkable sequence of poems. These both record and celebrate his daughter''s life from birth onwards but also take us through the death, the hunt for the murderer, the trial, and the aftermath, in a painfully honest, sensitive work written with both dignity and a strong poetic imagination.

Until this moment Roy Cameron has declined to speak publicly about the murder of his daughter. Now his poetry speaks for him, and also for Sara Cameron.