Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sarah Rowland Jones
Early Morning
The terns lift as one
from the salt-pools behind the beach
– a thick undulating line
the lazy ripple of a shaken-out duvet.
They dip, rise and swirl
like cream stirred through coffee
and dissolve into the mist.
Sarah Rowland Jones has been published in Poetry Wales and Snakeskin, and in anthologies and online by Seren and Eyewear, as well as in South Africa where she lived for a while before returning to Wales.
Manon Ceridwen James
A Parishioner Complains at a Parish Church Council When We Move the Time of Evensong You have changed the Bible you have changed the words in the service you have brought in girls to serve at the altar and women can now be sidesmen and any minute...
John Newton Webb
A dental technician rips up a postcard of dental puns Have you known the suffering wrought by damaged mouths? Or the solemn joy of healing? Have you reckoned with the uses of dental records? Think through the murdered and the long dead; think of things...
Simon Alderwick
coffee and the interconnectedness of all things i like the darkness of it, the bitterness, the ring of light reflected on the surface. i like the story. the crushed beans. the crop growing on the side of a mountain. i like the journey, but in...
Alistair Noon
Escape from the Novinskaya Women’s Prison, Moscow, 1909 Let’s imagine the doors that scraped the freshly cemented floors as a gaggle of raindrops escaped from a gutter, the timetabled chores in the crypts for their needles and cradles, the chapels...
Eve Chancellor
The Woods The teacher sighed, as the snow piled up outside, mountain after mountain. The children listened, as the North wind howled, winter after winter. ‘That will be all for today, children,’ the teacher said. The students rushed over to pegs,...
Sue Spiers
February 6th You are naked when I meet you, but then, so am I. I’d been waiting months for this occasion, after a delay we meet a week later. Dark hair is slathered on your forehead unruly with gross pomade. Your voice is a gurgle like creaking...
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Meditation on Shape I’ve been seeing breasts today. In the park, lavender is shorn into tidy humps and the lawn undulates creating two perfect peaks between some trees. A road sign, tipped over, nestles in leaves, warning that bumps lie ahead, its...
Jackie Wills
Dressmaker at the market I stop at the dressmaker's stall to ask what she does with leftovers. We discuss bunting - it's a slow day. I buy a £10 bag of scraps, swatches, snippets, interrupted patterns and borders. The bag taps a morse of promises...
Donna Campbell
A Murder of Crows I feed the crows that loiter in my back garden. The young ones know no manners and fail to bring me gifts like their older kin. They bring glittery things, discarded wishbones, rusted metal, random objects no doubt each with a...