Today’s choice
Previous poems
Katherine Duffy
Wake
(Leaving Amorgos, Greece)
The ferry pushes the sea,
forces a long, white reply
that speaks of where we’ve been –
a hulk of rock, a prison
in the time of the Colonels,
now a place of painted chairs,
fairy lights. I lean over,
try to read the disarranged water,
the sea in dark mode.
I count the times we’ve
come and gone. More
behind us now than before.
We sail on, past other islands
brothers gently sleeping.
The white scroll
reaches back,
undoes itself.
Katherine Duffy lives in Dublin. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Crannóg, The Interpreter’s House, etc. She has published collections with The Dedalus Press (Ireland) and in 2018 a pamphlet with Templar Poetry.
Audrey Cotterell
In a corner chapel of the abbey
I lit a small candle, and sent the flame
as a message only half composed
Dylan Foster
there’s not much you can do
when the planets
are telling you to stop
Jeff Skinner
Can’t hear yourself think only the bass line
of a heart thumping. Your head’s clamped.
Chalice Am Bergris
It is not like an egg cracking
or an exquisite shiver of shattered glass.
Piers Haben
When I lost loved ones last year
I thought my childhood fears would return.
Lesley Burt
There’s a house in a suburb of between-the-wars pebble-dash & bay windows, where the soundtrack is sighs, tuts & bellows, the clash of plates & jangle of cutlery.
Gabrielle Meadows
She gets into your bed
like when she was little.
Flowers grow out of the wardrobe,
moss claims the windowsill
Alice Huntley
I had a leaf in my hair when I arrived
the receptionist thought it was a hairclip
Gemma Blakeley
My Dad Complains That The Hedges Are Overgrown
and the word bemuses me, implying as it does
the concept of excess in what can only be good.