Today’s choice
Previous poems
Susan Jane Sims
Waiting
For Mark
After you died,
someone asked:
What was it like
in those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
I was not waiting.
Wanting, yes. Hoping, yes. For more days.
Finding joy in small things,
a game of Camel Cup, your favourite songs
and singing them with you,
reading to you
talking,
until you could no longer do
any of those things.
And then I watched your breath
entering and leaving a body
that had endured so much
and still remained beautiful.
We became a circle around you
just as you had asked us to:
your mum, your dad, your brothers,
your best friend.
We went with you as far
as it was possible to go.
Susan Jane Sims most recent collection is Splitting Sunlight (Dempsey & Windle, 2019). She publishes poetry through her Dorset based publishing company Poetry Space . She has been a poet in schools for Threshold Prize and a judge for the Poetry by Heart competition. She was a Hawthornden fellow in 2018.
Emma Lee
The instruction invites overthinking:
describe your hometown through
the medium of simple sentences
Vanessa Napolitano
I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive,
ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not
something I know how to cook.
David Forrest
I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other.
Neil Fulwood
Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift
has hacked the WiFi password
in the ear canal and now I’m looping back
endlessly to a misheard lyric . . .
Ira Lightman
Laid down, his upraised face is
White – offputting – on a plumped pillow.
Dave Wynne-Jones
“The all-consuming passion
is rarely found
more than a recipe
for misery,”
you read
Pat Edwards
He appears like a paper bag blown onto the feeder,
punching his beak time and again into the peanuts.
Kate Noakes
If you follow faerie lights
that wisp where boardwalk
becomes trackway, make sure
you’re stocked with milk,
or bread and salt.
Gopal Lahiri
My father stitched an evening with current ripples
spill over rocks and shadows gather at the corner,