Today’s choice
Previous poems
On the third day of Christmas, we bring you K. S. Moore, Kate Noakes and Rachael Smart
Poplars in the Mist
A crow’s eye weighs the view:
poplars and their spiky layers,
mist – all froth & pomp & wisp.
I am more poplar than mist.
I am there in each defiant branch:
stalky, not willowy, standing my ground.
I am always reaching for you
& the next you – the one that comes after –
the one that stops to know my soul,
but misses a dot in its dot-to-dot outline.
This is the you I struggle to know,
yet with poplars, I know my place.
I am their sister, more so now it’s winter
and mist gives us hair like drifting snow.
K. S. Moore’s debut poetry collection What frost does under a crescent moon is available from The Seventh Quarry Press. Achievements include being selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions 2022 and placing third in the Waterford Poetry Prize. @ksmoorepoet on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter
Cathnor Park 4pm, Wednesday
It’s too cold to scavenge
these frosty nights, so a fox,
bold as you like in the lengthening
stares at me from ten metres –
a handsome beast in ruddy health,
fully furred, brush bushy,
braving the light.
Braving the light
fully furred, brush bushy,
a handsome beast in ruddy health
stares at me from ten metres –
bold as you like in the lengthening
these frosty nights, so, a fox.
It’s too cold to scavenge.
Kate Noakes’ two most recent poetry publications are Goldhawk Road, Two Rivers Press, 2023 and Chalking the Pavement, Broken Sleep Books, 2024 boomslangpoetry.blogspot.com
Snow Globe
Picture this:
little witch girl
in Alaskan wilderness.
Ferny dendrites on glass.
Sleet as far as the dome
can go. She hears the big
in the sky. A whiteness
of swans skim on a rink
like one of those music
boxes you tame
with a key.
Footprints colossal as
father’s in his waders
and twiggier ones:
a silver chain
of sparrow’s toes.
All the hedgerows are
milk-dipped. She likes
to watch the waxwings
landing.
There are trees with no
clothes on and the cold
upon the valley is
a strip tease. She sees wolf,
mink, coyote, fox. Flakes
spin and drop. It is 2°c.
River ice cracks
beneath the weight
of spectres.
Rachael Smart has a thing about chemises and slips. She is never without fingerless gloves or a paperback. @SilkOctavia_
On the second day of Christmas, we bring you Gill McEvoy, Rachel Burns and Cindy Botha
On the way to the registry office it snows, flecks of white like spittle hitting the steamed-up bus windows, I worry the petals from my wedding posy.
On the first day of Christmas, we bring you Hannah Linden, John White and Stephen Keeler
. . . Now the villages is
en fête: dressed for a party in the dark,
across the fields, along uneven paths . . .
Anna Chorlton
She curled emerald
tights about the core of
an oak
slumbering with thick bare
limbs.
John Greening
On Stage in a home-made model theatre, c.1967 Glued to your block, in paint and ink you wait for Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life to stop. Smell of hardboard and hot bakelite. The lino curtain’s ready to go up. At which, the straightened coat hanger is shoved and on you...
Anna Bowles
Nothing bad can happen on a plane.
Engine fires, earache, hijackers; but no new grief.
Kirsty Fox
Winged Kirsty Fox is a writer and artist specialising in ecopoetics. She writes lyric essays and poetry, and has had work published by Apricot Press, Arachne Press, and Streetcake Magazine. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently studying...
Jason Ryberg
Sometimes I’d swear that
the ancient box fan I’ve hauled
around with me for
years is a receiver for
the conversations of ghosts
Peter Wallis
Dead in a chest,
are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.
Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
always Third week in August
Amanda Bell
We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims