Today’s choice
Previous poems
Steven Taylor
SPORTS NEWS
A very long time ago
Stephen Fry’s godfather, the
Justice, Sir Oliver Popplewell
Who chaired the inquiry
Into the Bradford City
Stadium fire that killed
56 football watchers, contrasted
The quiet dignity of those relatives
With the behaviour of the relatives
Of the Hillsborough victims, who
Were forever blaming other people
Instead of accepting
It is the lot of the working class
To suffer in all divisions
They should be grateful
For whatever leisure
They are granted
By their masters, betters
Sir Oliver was a cricketer
Wicket keeper batsman
16 stumpings 60-something catches
After Charterhouse
He went to Cambridge, studied
Steven Taylor was born and raised in Hyde, near Manchester. He now lives in Kilburn, London. Steven’s poems have been widely published in journals including Acumen, Magma, Poetry Business Coal anthology, Stand, The North and The Wallace Stevens Journal. He can be found on Facebook @steventaylorpoetry
Deborah Harvey
When an albatross crash-lands in a dream Long ago I saw an albatross fly head-first into a dream so fast so hard it penetrated half a mile deep. Inside the crater a wreckage of feather and bone remains which over millennia became this fossilised...
Penny Boxall
Post The days that follow, we both receive from you a letter. Jane’s was waiting in a bleary mailbox shuttered with snow, having crossed westbound while she hurried east. You couldn’t wait for spring. Mine was older, slipped with a tenner in an...
Constantin Preda
Gentrification Remember when hell was a thing? You could look it up in Dante, or better still in a history book you could extrapolate from The Geneva Convention. Remind me the tell you the story of the middle manager who unironically, referred to...
Alexander Etheridge
Lost is the Story Everyone loses their time at the same rapid speed—it’s like flying shrapnel, or a quickly strobing light. We’re all moving into another life, another dying. The oceans feel it too— and every tree churns quietly in its center with...
Juliet Humphreys
Mrs Hitchcock Takes a Bath I’m not so sure about showers — if you must know it’s the sound how it rushes, pounding, drowning everything and, dear, sometimes — I know it’s probably only the pipes — but sometimes it screams so I’ll just take a bath...
Rachel Curzon
Mrs Yeats’ Love Letters from the Other Side Mrs Yeats slackens carefully in her comfortable front room. Perhaps her slow arm drags a lace antimacassar from a sofa back. Perhaps her lips part in an O. Mrs Yeats unfolds and sags. Where is Mr Yeats?...
Judith Wozniak
Surveillance She heard it again last night, a rattle wrapped in the rain, pebble-dashing the window. A scrabble outside her door, calling her name. Eyes peer through the letter box. Somebody moves her clothes, tears her magazines. She keeps watch at her...
Caspar Bryant
Forgiveness clay-sifting one wellyboot year to make him the pizza oven, I was forgiven, wading through the midges encrusted with sun- light sifting leaves & I seven or eight scoured the bank in slow flow fingers freeze beachspade hefted...
Duncan Forbes
Pond in June Among the lily-pads’ congested leaves, above the pond, white water-lilies flower, their yellow stamens in bright asterisks like fried eggs somehow learning origami and, coloured like a childish sun or star, unblinkingly each water-lily...