Today’s choice
Previous poems
On the third day of Christmas, we bring you K. S. Moore, Kate Noakes and Rachael Smart
Poplars in the Mist
A crow’s eye weighs the view:
poplars and their spiky layers,
mist – all froth & pomp & wisp.
I am more poplar than mist.
I am there in each defiant branch:
stalky, not willowy, standing my ground.
I am always reaching for you
& the next you – the one that comes after –
the one that stops to know my soul,
but misses a dot in its dot-to-dot outline.
This is the you I struggle to know,
yet with poplars, I know my place.
I am their sister, more so now it’s winter
and mist gives us hair like drifting snow.
K. S. Moore’s debut poetry collection What frost does under a crescent moon is available from The Seventh Quarry Press. Achievements include being selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions 2022 and placing third in the Waterford Poetry Prize. @ksmoorepoet on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter
Cathnor Park 4pm, Wednesday
It’s too cold to scavenge
these frosty nights, so a fox,
bold as you like in the lengthening
stares at me from ten metres –
a handsome beast in ruddy health,
fully furred, brush bushy,
braving the light.
Braving the light
fully furred, brush bushy,
a handsome beast in ruddy health
stares at me from ten metres –
bold as you like in the lengthening
these frosty nights, so, a fox.
It’s too cold to scavenge.
Kate Noakes’ two most recent poetry publications are Goldhawk Road, Two Rivers Press, 2023 and Chalking the Pavement, Broken Sleep Books, 2024 boomslangpoetry.blogspot.com
Snow Globe
Picture this:
little witch girl
in Alaskan wilderness.
Ferny dendrites on glass.
Sleet as far as the dome
can go. She hears the big
in the sky. A whiteness
of swans skim on a rink
like one of those music
boxes you tame
with a key.
Footprints colossal as
father’s in his waders
and twiggier ones:
a silver chain
of sparrow’s toes.
All the hedgerows are
milk-dipped. She likes
to watch the waxwings
landing.
There are trees with no
clothes on and the cold
upon the valley is
a strip tease. She sees wolf,
mink, coyote, fox. Flakes
spin and drop. It is 2°c.
River ice cracks
beneath the weight
of spectres.
Rachael Smart has a thing about chemises and slips. She is never without fingerless gloves or a paperback. @SilkOctavia_
On the Second Day of Christmas, we bring you Sean Smith, Rose Anderson and David Van-Cauter
Christmas Tree The chainsaw, a hive of angry wasps, chewed the bark and something tall and graceful collapsed with a low groan as its needles pricked the earth. Below, the city lights were plugged into the socket of the bay as we loaded the tree...
On the First Day of Christmas, we bring you Eithar Almosibeah, Numan Awan and Casey Brennan
Christmas gatherings I've lost my manners this quarantine. My ability to keep the curtains of my mouth stretched open for a smile suffered. My social skills, a turned off faucet in those months of longing for connection. Words refused to stream...
Janet Harper
bee I am all hum and thrum whirr sibilate vibrate zip zoom and swoop purr murmur hover manoeuvre bombilate and susurrate pulse race oscillate escalate and dive reverberate I am all bee Janet Harper’s...
JLM Morton
More Facts About Blue If I were to ask you to guess the world’s most wanted colour Not a chest of it reached England without the stain of human Darkened as if by bruising. In the womb of the vat there is life Gnosis at temporal frequency in...
Rose Lennard
Entwined Like honeysuckle tendrils she leans in to him and he to her young pliant bodies long smooth fingers interlaced heads together, murmuring like a small stream over rounded pebbles. She touches lips to his forehead and when they shift...
Julian Bishop
The Last Days Of The Giraffe She stared down from her beige towerblock onto an alien plain: zig-zag of roofs, wingless cranes, zebra crossings and a sea of litter - the new neighbours behaved like bushpigs. Once she used to hoof it down the Thames...
Tom Kelly
When they go they will still text you give an unexpected call keeping it brief, before a meeting but the phone is dead and it is the first time I have used that word. You will still shout up the stairs ring the bell there is no-one there key...
Hiba Heba
Cloudage I see you. Like me, you’re misshapen; a swamp in a dwelling. We merge; a suture quivers through us, the way nightmares take long strides on still waters. We’re camping under the mellow lilts of our alibi; the breath checks out. ...
Jessica Mookherjee
Hungry Ghost In Hinduism a Hungry Ghost (or Preta) is fed rice so it can reincarnate. Write prayers for the dead today, feed them rice balls, they see only three children, say there is another one somewhere, knocking on the outline of a womb,...