Today’s choice
Previous poems
J.P. Lancaster
Ivy’s deference and not
Ivy thrives
despite dependency.
It hangs on, has its other day.
Ivy does not press its case.
Its patient face is no surprise.
It does not draw attention to itself.
Its business is in secretive delight.
It’s second violin to any other instrument.
It clings with tendril anchor feet establishing a base.
As if from nothing, when the time is right
its berries burst like fronds of aubergine-dark rain,
September elder, glossy, orderly and plump,
its umbel firework pulses bursting to be seen.
It later desiccates, but not
from tiredness, resolved maturity
frayed hemp strands on the vine.
Ivy’s complexity is fabulous.
Self-effacement underlining paradox,
write-in evergreen of posts,
single oaks with one bare fractured branch
in need of first response,
shipwrecked in a roadside hedge,
whitewashed walls
which failed to wash behind their ears,
and then turned flaky sour
anything upstanding marginal.
Ivy’s deference,
harm-free cohabiting,
which burgeons bright, as self-defence.
J.P. Lancaster was born in Cardiff and brought up in Barry, Vale of Glamorgan. He was educated at St John’s College, Oxford, which came as a shock. He has taught in various countries.
Amy Dugmore
How much water did you have to drink this morning?
Did you sip your coffee without worrying
about its diuretic properties? Was it sunny
where you were?
Hannah Linden
I was cutlery left out in the rain, rusty
by morning, a side-slipping fiddlestick
desperate for music, starved for company.
Eve Chancellor
Imagine waking up one day and discovering
that you are a horse. At first, you might not
believe it and think you are dreaming.
Ananya S Guha
The leaves are growing out of
a harangue of loneliness
palms cupped I listen to silences
of winter or summers
Peter Leight
Instead of Dying I’m Taking a Trip
to Kansas
where the light appears
as if walking through a gate
in the air
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
Its timber frame held together by the waste
of its own decay
The rot a kind of glue undisturbed
Cracked panes of glass hold their fractures
Rosie Jackson
I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying
Charlotte Holm, Jennifer A McGowan
A leaky drainpipe drips
creating damp patches on uneven paving,
slime green algae blossoms
forming viridescent ripples
James McDermott
if samsara’s concrete please don’t come back
as black jackal for I live in Norwich
nor spineless worm as I don’t have a lawn