Today’s choice
Previous poems
Linda McKenna
Smashing Narcissus
We set about him with rifle butts and spades,
waiting our turn alongside our enemies,
the same sunburnt flesh, the same blistered
feet. Met where our camps, the same badly
pitched shelters, the same lack of meat,
converged. Laboured in the stifling heat
at the command of our officers, the same
fools and bullies. Smashed and smashed
at the indecently gleaming white marble,
until the lawn sparkled with a covering
of unseasonable frost. Later, picking splinters
from the same worn-out blankets, knew
if we looked into the shimmering lake
we would see the true picture of ourselves.
Linda McKenna’s second collection, Four Thousand Keys, was published by Doire Press in 2024. The title poem from her debut collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, (Doire Pres 2020), won the 2020 An Post Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year. She has had poems published in a wide range of publications and in 2018 won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing.
Anita Karla Kelly, CE Collins, Clare Painter on International Women’s Day
In the beginning of the end she bit the thing she wasn’t meant to bite.
Apple stuck in her throat, one bite taken, then swallowed whole.
Elaine Baker
To my Ovaries
My cahoonas. My muscular daisies.
Potent white olives. You make me sick.
Jan FitzGerald
What is not to love
when you draw back curtains
and taste clouds
in their newness and innocence
Helen Finney
At my feet the window sprawls a view of kneaded land,
craggy baked by the hand of the gods, dusted green
with short bit grass.
Eugene O’Hare
It hasn’t been this bright all year –
the moon’s white scalp, spot-lit,
a head turned away from a thing
the rest of us fear: unearthly dark
Juliet Humphreys
Though I am not a painter
this is to be a portrait
of my parents and my sister.
Julian Dobson
You too I guess
have studied the surviving starlings
as they swoop and whistle
by the snack trailer at Moorfoot
Mark Czanik
I loved the tales Luke told me of starving writers,
and the sacrifices they made following their hearts.
Philip K Dick eating dog food. Bukowski’s candy bars.
Nigel King
My compass – its needle set with a sliver of blue stone – spins and spins. Breath mists my snow
goggles. I wipe them endlessly. Even in these thick seal-skin mitts my hands are frozen. I have been
no place as still as this.