Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sue Norton
Summer’s End
Today I tipped the packet of coffee
into the cafetiere instead of the tin.
Caught myself in time, didn’t pour water in.
I’ve started to write notes to myself:
Shut bathroom window. Lock back door.
Yesterday at the bank I couldn’t remember
mini statement but I can recognise
this orange blur, this hover of wings
above abelia grandiflora, a hummingbird
hawk moth exploring the tube-flowers
with its long tongue. I sip my coffee.
Old age comes tapping up my garden path
on unsteady feet, but I’m content to watch
a flycatcher flitting up and back, up
and back to its perch on the fence post,
the hawk moth probing
trumpet by trumpet as it siphons
nectar’s last drops,
the flycatcher fluttering up to snatch
one more feed at summer’s end,
preparing for migration.
Sue Norton has had poems published in various magazines and anthologies.
Lesley Burt
There’s a house in a suburb of between-the-wars pebble-dash & bay windows, where the soundtrack is sighs, tuts & bellows, the clash of plates & jangle of cutlery.
Gabrielle Meadows
She gets into your bed
like when she was little.
Flowers grow out of the wardrobe,
moss claims the windowsill
Alice Huntley
I had a leaf in my hair when I arrived
the receptionist thought it was a hairclip
Gemma Blakeley
My Dad Complains That The Hedges Are Overgrown
and the word bemuses me, implying as it does
the concept of excess in what can only be good.
Nick Cooke
Molluscous receivers, would that you could
turn your talents inwards, and pick up
all that goes on in the cerebral swamp . . .
Luke Moran
There’s a
flash of colour
from the hedge.
Cáit O’Neill McCullagh
And when you step into the clearing
there will be dancing. The unsteady moon, shaken
to ribbon; shimmering through regalia of clouds.
Adam Cairns
A buzzard mews, turns in the wind,
a faraway engine grumbles.
Siân Bentham
She doesn’t know what she is doing.
She chops and boils, snacks and sneezes, sits.
Classical radio plays, imbuing
the scene with comic dignity and wit.