Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jean O’Brien
Spring is in the Air
Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted,
birds peck with blunted beaks,
pushing up are the blind green pods
of what will soon be yellow daffodils,
given light and air.
I wait to hear news about you,
hear that you resurfaced,
struggled up throught the ether,
your broken ribs tied tight
with titanium wire
holding your heart in place.
Your spread chest stapled together
skin taut like delicate tissue
and pocked with steel.
I am afraid with spring unfolding
you will ripen and split apart
your heart bursting with daffodils.
Jean O’Brien is an award winning poet whose latest collection Stars Burn Regardless was published by Salmon Poetry (Irl) in 2022. She was most recently shortlisted in this year’s Bridport Prize. She currently tutors in poetry/creative writing. www.jeanobrienpoet.ie
Bel Wallace
Month by month I felt my muscles harden
these hefty horns grew from my long skull
Stephen Keeler
Something about arriving somewhere new
just as afternoon is leaving . . .
Geraldine Stoneham
The silence and peace of this place
creeps through on birdsong.
Emma Lee
The instruction invites overthinking:
describe your hometown through
the medium of simple sentences
Vanessa Napolitano
I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive,
ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not
something I know how to cook.
David Forrest
I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other.
Neil Fulwood
Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift
has hacked the WiFi password
in the ear canal and now I’m looping back
endlessly to a misheard lyric . . .
Ira Lightman
Laid down, his upraised face is
White – offputting – on a plumped pillow.
Dave Wynne-Jones
“The all-consuming passion
is rarely found
more than a recipe
for misery,”
you read