Today’s choice
Previous poems
Elizabeth Loudon
Forty (for Maryna)
The first three days of war
have a surprising holiday feel.
No deadlines, just the giddy gasp of shock.
Ordinary life continues.
The girl in white socks in the flat downstairs
plays a prelude then turns, pleased,
to an audience of one, who awakes
as if from a deep sleep
and manages to applaud.
Later, you hear sirens and grab sugar lumps
for the baby, throw slippers to your father
who can’t tie his shoes.
In the tunnels you sit close together for warmth.
Nobody sings. In the cold you realise
you left your favourite red jacket on the bus,
but this is no time for tantrums
when there are boys face down,
all for a few square metres of mud,
who were once face down upon you.
It takes forty nights to become accustomed
to anything that strips you to the core:
a difficult birth, cold-eyed jailor,
our failure to come to your rescue.
The little green light beside your name
still said available. Any earlier,
we’d have screwed up our entrance.
It’s not easy, either, sitting on the side-lines
and stroking the lithium-lit news, over and over.
It looks like we’re smiling.
We’re not. It’s what our faces do
when they hurt, stuffed with words
that are hard to spit, harder to swallow.
If you’d only feel sorry for us.
Elizabeth Loudon is a poet and novelist living in southwest England after 25 years in the US. She writes about violence, loss and displacement, and mothers and daughters. When not writing, She’s mostly outside. There’s more at www.elizabethloudon.com.
Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
A lacquer table, gloss under fingertips. A raised stage with dark linen. A young woman smiles with her hand-held harp, its nine strings glistening. The room swells with the cadence of her pearly notes. Beneath the pendant lights—a vision of serenity.
Pratibha Castle
Conscience
as taught her by the nuns was a bridle
on a young girl’s tongue
K. S. Moore
Teenage years
everything begins
it never ends
Jim Murdoch
I didn’t know what to do with all my dad’s love
so, I minded it for him fully intending to give it back one day.
Finola Scott
Such a knife, a real Et Tu Brute number. Bone handled, incisive. Decades of marriage
had whetted the blade to feather lean. Anniversaries marked in metal.
Sarah James/Leavesley
My mother’s knife made the first cuts –
she removed my fertile light bulbs,
then stuffed my womb with shredded tissues.
Max Wallis
god grant us the serenity / to accept the things we cannot change / the courage to change the / things we can / and the wisdom to know el differencio /
Play, National Poetry Day: Heather Hughes, Laura Webb, Jude Brigley
We searched so long for that clover.
Every time the sun shone we scoured
the fields and woods, running past
the children playing with skipping ropes
Play, For National Poetry Day: Suzanna Fitzpatrick, Charlotte Dormandy, Lee Fraser
10 Children dart in the dark, screamers
streaming sweets and neon, their parents