Today’s choice
Previous poems
Trelawney
What is holding you back from building your wormery?
You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
And no lack of wood – an affluence of pallet offcuts. Here –
the frames are half-made! Is it the fear of getting it wrong?
Of irreversible mistakes now drilled in. The commitment
to a design that might not ultimately lead to compost.
Is it the threat of foxes – always the foxes – that you might
aid their survival? Or the lack of a lid to keep it all in?
Is it the prospect of no longer having a wormery to build?
Of being someone who is no longer building a wormery.
Someone done with DIY. Done with improvements. With no purpose left.
Of being someone who even builds a wormery.
But you will keep it, as an unfinished testimony. A celebration
of indecision. And one day decomposed small print might
mingle with castoffs, for the worms to make sense of it all.
Trelawney has featured in the Bridport and Winchester Poetry Prizes and Munster Literature Centre’s International Chapbook Competition; and has work published in the Broken Sleep anthologies of modern Cornish poets and on masculinity, Magma, Southword, and elsewhere. Iinsta.BenTrelawney
David Van-Cauter
…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad. . .
Tim Dwyer
Unexpectedly
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air
Paul Moclair
Their shore leave over,
. . . the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again.
Susan Elizabeth Hale
Sometimes words are the only thing
that get you through,
But not the words you think,
not a word like love or hope
those are imprecise.
Seán Street
We lit a candle for you
that day in Sacre Coeur,
under its white-flame dome
as high as Paris could go
Marjory Woodfield
On Kinley’s Lane, quince tree, wild blackberries, branches of feijoa reaching over a fence, fallen fruit.
Ian Seed
What was the Welsh for ‘hedgehog’? That was what he wanted to know.
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Rectangular, with corners cut off like an octagon, muddy brown shows through the cream exterior where the edges are chipped.
Cally Ann Kerr on International Transgender Day of Visibility
How many blows does it take to crack an egg?
Is a question I never expected to ask
If you don’t know, I should tell you, an egg
Is what they call the girl inside the male mask