Today’s choice

Previous poems

Colin Pink

 

 

 

Thorny (One Sided Conversations No4)
after seeing Akram Khan’s Giselle 18 Jan 2026

to embrace you is like clasping
a fist full of briars

if your mouth was an envelope
I’d lick it shut

you can push all you like against
the wall between

the living and the dead
but it won’t give

yet I hunger still
cannot forget the taste of you

your honeysuckle heart
is held in my grasp

and there is nowhere on earth
to put it down

 

 

Colin Pink co-chairs the Barnes & Chiswick poetry stanza. His books of poems are: Acrobats of Sound (2016), The Ventriloquist Dummy’s Lament (2019), Typicity (2021) and Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy (2021).

Simon Williams

What were these fairies called
before we knew of hummingbirds?
Bumblebee moth because of the size?
Reed-nose moth because of the proboscis?

Daniel Sluman

just as the night sky shifts
beyond the minds

of the animals outside

the ceilings
we are pressed beneath change

in aspect & colour

Farah Ali

Notes from nature on how to survive this:
 
1. Learn crypsis and mimesis be a gecko or a mossy frog
 
2. Method actors sway like dead-leaf mantises on branches