Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sue Moules
BLACKBIRD IN THE EARLY MORNING
Sings at the top of the bare-branched tree
an aubade to morning
welcomes the light,
early spring, season of nest-making.
This melody is not for me
but to attract a mate.
I walk the dog under the dulcet notes
and think he sings for me.
Blackbird on the verge
gathers small sticks in his orange beak,
lifts into the sky where
tree branches hold shapes of air.
Blackbird tugging worms out of grass
to feed his young,
always singing even at night
falling notes of: keep away, keep away.
Sue Moules has been published in New Welsh Review, Planet, Poetry Wales, and Ambit. She also has poems included in the International Women’s Day anthology (Welsh Women’s Coalition 2010), By Ways Anthology (Arachne ) 2024, and Words on Troubled Waters (Lutra Press) 2024. Her poem ‘Walking the Whippet’ was chosen for Brighton and Hove Poems on the Buses (2024). Her most recent collection is The Moth Box (Parthian).
David Belcher
I am about to do something bodacious Barefoot in the yard, eating a slice of buttered toast, I feel a tremor in my bones. Usually, I am full of plans, but not today. I cannot picture the future. I am carried along by the sensation that I am about...
Judith Taylor
The necklace was a gift from where they mine it out of the mountains. Haematite: an iron stone. Dense beads as grey as the metal; polished. It is cold against its wearer till it borrows some of their blood heat and if they should move too freely...
Julie Laing
Julie Laing is a Glasgow-based writer and artist. She won the 2022 Wigtown Poetry Prize and is a recent Clydebuilt Verse Apprenticeship mentee. Her work has been published in several anthologies including Gutter and The Edwin Morgan Centenary Collection. More...
Cassandra Atherton, Paul Hetherington (co-authors)
Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised and award-winning prose poet and scholar of prose poetry. She was a Harvard Visiting Scholar in English and a Visiting Fellow at Sophia University, and is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin...
Rebecca Gethin
Slow Burn My mother’s life was fire, a smoulder inching along the spliced fuse of her life. Among her first words were coke and coal delivered by the black-smeared coalman who emptied sacks on his shoulders into the cellar. The chunks glistened in...
Will Snelling
A.M. P.M. Step out into the day’s whiteness And breathe the bad air. The early chill reminds you you’re here. The sky is birdless, And planes chew through the sinewy clouds. The taste of coffee is dark In your mouth. The hot black shock Tore open the...
Ben Banyard
Morning, Mister Magpie Think of all the chain letters you had to write, the time you were almost knocked down crossing to avoid a window cleaner’s ladder, the look on your face when I put that brolly up indoors. For you, 13 isn’t an ordinary...
Matt Nicholson
Birdsong in the playground I asked a sea-gull on a see-saw what’s it all for, what’s it all about? He said nowt and flew away. I asked a crow on a swing the self-same thing, but he refused to say anything, he just hopped off to the roundabout,...
Maggie Mackay
She believes herself to be a field creature Nessie is losing her mind boiling cotton with bleach all year long. She stalks lands and fields at twilight, fashions a dress from a beetle’s shell. The women in the dormitories don’t sleep a jot for...