Today’s choice

Previous poems

Trelawney

 

 

 

What is holding you back from building your wormery?

You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
And no lack of wood – an affluence of pallet offcuts. Here –
the frames are half-made! Is it the fear of getting it wrong?
Of irreversible mistakes now drilled in. The commitment
to a design that might not ultimately lead to compost.
Is it the threat of foxes – always the foxes – that you might
aid their survival? Or the lack of a lid to keep it all in?

Is it the prospect of no longer having a wormery to build?
Of being someone who is no longer building a wormery.
Someone done with DIY. Done with improvements. With no purpose left.

Of being someone who even builds a wormery.
But you will keep it, as an unfinished testimony. A celebration
of indecision. And one day decomposed small print might
mingle with castoffs, for the worms to make sense of it all.

 

 

Trelawney has featured in the Bridport and Winchester Poetry Prizes and Munster Literature Centre’s International Chapbook Competition; and has work published in the Broken Sleep anthologies of modern Cornish poets and on masculinity, Magma, Southword, and elsewhere. Iinsta.BenTrelawney

Jacqueline Saphra

      Diaspora I lost both my lovely uncles one after the other to another country. Jubilantly they had passed their examinations and once equipped with white coats and certificates they poised to join the gloried institutions only to find corridors...

Cindy Botha

      Melt If a white bear’s weight tilts the floe where once he stood in balance with the ice― If he opens himself to a barely discernible scent of seal but it drifts off like sleet― If a bear pads the asphalt of a seaside town sallowed by streetlight...

Paul Fenn

      Without you I won’t believe in ghosts but the day after they told me you had died, I saw you everywhere we had been. Not there in that dark garden shed with me as I built a gate, that startlingly first bright day of early summer but in India, that...

Lucy Dixcart

      Paper Dolls She did well, my secret twin – kept us alive, deflected blows, absorbed each wound into our body, quiet as a tree. I didn’t notice her leave until the wind whistled in and a bird flew from my mouth. Later I unfolded myself like a chain...

Huw Gwynn-Jones

      To a Good Night’s Sleep You know how it goes but never why or when – perhaps it’s all that cheese and caffeine or a black cat crossing but sure as broken eggs make omelettes you can bet your life that one night all your hidden quirks and...

James McDermott

      Little Monuments my brain is no longer full of pound coins paperbacks with my name on    rainbow flags tax bills    Instagram followers    my brain is now Dad’s pierced left ear lobe that I touched for first and last time in chapel of rest to see...

Paul Stephenson

      Long Haul In Buenos Aires, the high-rises are built with stacks of premium steak, while in Patagonia, the killer whales like to beach themselves, Tuesdays at half-past four in the afternoon to play a game of pat-a-cake. Bake me a cake, as slow as...

Tim Kiely

      Major Arcana No. XXI: The World  You could believe the all is dancing somewhere where the body is not bruised, where hearts are glowing like an earthrise, where all time and time’s losses, all wrongs are resolved in the golden snake that winds...

Louiza Lazarou

      From The Last Divided Capital In The World Childhood memories of sandbags, and barrels against barbed wired brick walls barricading the way to the unknown. The spoken of in choked up breaths. Displaced throats echo into mouths born generations...