Today’s choice
Previous poems
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. Shawls,
as if ermine, still scurrying (wee winter-whitened weasels).
& the one elm sways too. Lit, like a many-armed Durga.
You think a tree can be stilled by soil? That roots would
drown a soul in ground? Stay your sights, even as body
sends you circling. Look, un-giddied. Remain: forward
& centre. Pasts done & undone. You, the rhythm of quake.
Waken. Clear forest from your feet. Listen. It will be your
name calling & you hearing it spoken, for the first time.
Cáit O’Neill McCullagh‘s debut collection The Bone Folder was shortlisted for The Saltires, in 2025; the year she won the McLellan Prize. Living with cancer, at home in the Highlands, she is writing her next collection (TBP 2027). See @kittyjomac and www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org
Kay Feneley
Some days I must immerse myself in the waters
These days are more than others
Monday 09.06 – a sewage overflow has activated
David I. Hughes
He does not shout. He charts.
Where treaty lines once hung like old nets,
he inks the deep, the dark, the yet-unmade.
Anne Stewart
Huddled on the cat’s blanket,
hyenas crying through the night.
Scribbled notes regretting tea,
Mark Czanik
I loved the tales Luke told me of starving writers,
and the sacrifices they made following their hearts.
Stephen Chappell
She has a way of tilting your head
as if lining up a thought.
Tristan Moss
I try
not to think
about my daughter’s
condition
when I
hug her
Susan J. Atkinson
I tell you my heart is breaking
but the heart has four chambers
and is not shaped like a heart at all
Peter Daniels
No, no one is who they think they are,
nor what we think they are, either:
the demon inside is thinking it
and you can’t tell him.
Paul Stephenson
Like one of those horses
on the carousel
going round and round in circles
sliding up and down a pole