Today’s choice
Previous poems
Hilary Thompson
Hot Cross Buns
Ambling up North Street
on a Saturday afternoon
at the end of a long Winter,
I am stopped by two women,
elderly, smiling eyes and mouths,
lip-sticked, offering an open pack
of hot cross buns from the NISA shop
down the road. The shorter of the two
with red hair folded back behind her head
says: would you like a hot cross bun, dear?
I look, smile back at the kind offer and say:
thank you but I’m gluten free.
She looks me straight in the eye, holds me there
for a long moment and says: Jesus still loves you, dear.
Thank you, I say, still smiling.
Hilary Thompson writes poetry as an everyday occupation.
Irene Cunningham
Lavender seeps. I expect my limbs to leaden, lead the body down through sheet, mattress-cover, into the machinery of sleep where other lives exist.
Graham Clifford
The Still Face Experiment
You must have seen that Youtube clip
where a mother lets her face go dead.
Her toddler carries on burbling for twenty to thirty seconds until she realises there is nothing coming back to her.
Susan Jane Sims
After you died,
someone asked:
What was it like
in those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
Jane Frank
I imagine returning to the house.
Furniture is piled up in the rain—
the ideas that won’t fit.
Ilias Tsagas
I used to dial your number to hear your voice. I would hold the receiver for a long time as if your voice was trapped inside . . .
Jim Paterson
Shove it, that farewell
and the sky shimmering with frost
and the waves wrecking on the shore
Philip Rush
Tom’s advice, mind you,
was to drink hot chocolate
last thing at night
on a garden bench
beneath the moon.
Rosie Jackson
Today, I talked with a friend about death
and what it means to have arrived in my life
before I have to leave it . . .
Mariam Saidan
they said sing in private,
Zan shouldn’t sing.