Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kevin Denwood
Waiting Room
Name called.
Not mine.
Wasn’t I
here first?
A new arrival
spreads out.
One chair
always left empty.
I glance at copies of
National Geographic,
Vogue,
Woman’s Weekly —
all out of date.
It’s possible
they expired
while I was waiting.
Impatient sighs
mix with the soft
turn of a page.
I glance
around the room.
Nothing catches.
Some scroll frantically.
Others pretend to decipher
The Economist.
Most stare
into space
or at their shoes.
I read the poster
about prostate cancer
again.
Kevin Denwood is a Cumbrian poet whose work explores memory, ageing and everyday social observation. His poems have appeared in Free the Verse, Obsessed with Pipework, and Poems, Tales & Other English Words.
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Towards the Solstice
owls fly closer in December twilight,
call to each other across the garden.
Martin Fisher
Inside, in the half-light, the iron rot took hold.
Forgotten service–obsolete.
Salt-coin neglect.
The money flowed inland,
Moored on an hourglass choke.
No one told the sea.
Craig Dobson
Out of morning
a misted light,
glowing fire
in the air.
Steven Taylor
A very long time ago
Stephen Fry’s godfather, the
Justice, Sir Oliver Popplewell
Who chaired the inquiry
Into the Bradford City
Amirah Al Wassif
Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb.
His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb.
Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone—
Singing,
Cracking jokes,
Mark Smith
In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected
Toby Cotton
A blustery day –
the wind too strong for kites
or for lifts to the sky.
“To a thoughtful spot,” it cites
and pins me to the earth.