Today’s choice
Previous poems
Maggie Brookes-Butt
Yoga
For you, with your toddler bendiness,
the squat is a natural, easy position
while I hurt-strain, thinking of miners
crouched outside their front doors
on terraced streets, practising every day
in the cramped conditions of their work
until the body adjusted and it became
normal, like living without daylight
and breathing dust, just as we inhale
fumes, drink micro plastics and sieved
sewage without a second’s hesitation.
Forget all that, quiet my whirring brain,
show me how to bow to the animals,
down-dog and cat-cow, rear up together
like cobras, soar into eagles or graceful
cranes flying. Steady each other. My balance
is better than yours for now, though not
my equilibrium. Let us build bridges, cross
legs, fold palms in namaste, look backwards
between our legs, marvel at the topsy-turvy
world and lie side by side, gripping our toes
while I learn from you how to be happy baby.
Maggie Brookes-Butt is a novelist and poet. Her six poetry collections (as Maggie Butt) are coming together in a New and Selected in January. Her Penguin Random House historical novels are published as Maggie Brookes. Insta: Maggie__Brooke.
Philip Gross
This is the song of the cells’
soft throb, the quivering coherences,
their shuffling the profit and loss
of life, to have and to hold.
Jenny Hope
No man can hold me.
See –
I blur the line between days . . .
Damaris West
In the circle
of its trees
the lochan shines
midnight silk.
B. Anne Adriaens
symptoms she is aggregate concrete and grit held together in a human shape lying on her side knees drawn up flesh tensing to stone and tendons in flames the weight of her body pressed into the mattress leaves a shallow hollow once she’s gone a...
Martin Potter
glimmer blades
the field’s lightly fogged
grass green
Moira McPartlin
Outside the Berber tent
the poet and I contemplate
the boundless Sahara sky.
Matthew James Friday
We totem our empires with the raptor,
weave into flags, fix on coins
but what of the victims?
How come no one ever glories the fish . . .
Ansuya Patel
Think what it must have been like for her
fasting from sunrise to moonrise, to wake up
three hours before dawn, bathe, apply sindoor
on the parting of her hair line . . .
Chris Beckett
Zerihun drove him over the dead-cow hills and Bob’s long hair stood up with shock at what he saw.