Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ananya S Guha
Halting Dreams
The leaves are growing out of
a harangue of loneliness
palms cupped I listen to silences
of winter or summers
and unmask faces caught in
tangle of storm, the history of
what was not written or recorded
in books, time’s erasure in moments
fraught with changing paths or charge
with turbulence of rains;
A vast momentary haul of a ship’s load
or a vessel’s yachting,
it is fun to remember and demonise time
in these hills where a cloudburst thumps
the heart, pounds on it like merciless beating
of bird’s wings, or like the beak of a crow
steals thunder, I walk and then a reservoir
pumps blood into the hiatus of living the dead.
Or, the dead living. Shadows typically torment,
lengthen or shorten to spin yarns
in these dead blue hills where a rosary
does not match prayer, but the bluish hue
carps on dreams and a thicket of grass
stumbles in front of you. I wash pains momentarily as a rising quicksand halts
my dreams.
Ananya S Guha lives in Shillong. He has ten collections of poetry in English and has been writing and publishing his poetry for the last forty years.
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
Cheryl Snell, Alice Gregorio, Peter Lilly
I grew up on a farm so I should know all about expensive cows and free milk. You’re taking being a debutante much too literally. We only meant to give permission for you to make a good match, not flit among the suitable boys…
Jade Kleiner
There is the green that birthed all pine trees.
Tom Blake
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.
Kate Bonfield
Coming home to days of heat
trapped beyond the door, to time skewed
by time away, the house bigger and
smaller than before.