Today’s choice
Previous poems
Royal Rhodes
Afterlife
Perhaps the friends of Lazarus, who died
and slipped his shroud, on seeing him might swoon
or rush to hear the tales of that beyond
they hoped and feared to face. Perhaps some cried
or shook and got themselves quite drunk by noon.
Or had the cynics laughed and only yawned?
And when he died again, did any weep?
Seeing you again across the room —
laughing you were free of loss or gloom
before the earth’s midnight — had made me keep
the night you asked me both to stay and leave
an anniversary of love and hate.
I thought I should observe my death that date.
I did, But now I know enough to grieve.
Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who taught courses on global religions for almost forty years. His poetry has been published widely in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. He lives now in a rural village in central Ohio and enjoys contemplating the beauty of nature around him.
On the seventh day of Christmas, we bring you Sue Burge, Erica Hesketh and Max Wallis
Once there was nothing sweeter than snow
On the sixth day of Christmas, we bring you Amy Rafferty, Tim Kiely and D.A.Prince
We pick up where you left off, searching still,
choosing random cards from a dealer’s deck:
twenty-one crows in a night-time tree,
deep within the dark, with all that chatter
On the fifth day of Christmas, we bring you Paul McGrane, Kevin Reid and Helen Evans
As regular as Santa Claus, she’d call
around at Christmas, the next-door neighbour
and my Sunday school teacher, Mrs Williams.
On the fourth day of Christmas, we bring you Leusa Lloyd, Lydia Benson and Charlotte Johnson
It is always Christmas in the loft
On the third day of Christmas, we bring you K. S. Moore, Kate Noakes and Rachael Smart
Picture this:
little witch girl
in Alaskan wilderness.
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...