Today’s choice
Previous poems
Paul Moclair
Postscript
Dusk on the third day of the Buddhist feast
of Obon and toro nagashi gets underway
across Japan. Their shore leave over,
the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again. The candle boats
are set afloat, the surface of the rivers lit,
flotillas flicker off into the dark, and on.
These images come back to me the week
after my mother’s death, listening as she reads
her favourite poems. I edit each recording
with the same detached respect
the undertaker showed washing her body.
I drain each clip of hiss and static,
nip and trim all hum and crackle, soothe popped plosives,
then ensure that each caesura’s uniform,
bind them in crisp audio winding sheets
and set them sailing off through cyberspace.
It’s now a waiting game. Her future lies
in someone else’s hands – an accidental
necromancer trawling YouTube for a poem,
whose choice summons my mother’s voice
to flicker back to life again, and warm
a stranger’s room somewhere. Till then
she’s neither here nor there.
For months no radar sifting those cold seas,
identifies the drifting ghost ship fleet.
And then a hit! A woman writing from
Newcastle (not my mother’s home beneath
the Mournes but its namesake across the water).
has chanced upon her reading Heaney’s Postscript.
She proffers comfort, signs off simply ‘Dawn’.
Paul Moclair is from Northern Ireland. He completed an MA in Writing Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, QUB in 2025. He has been published in The Ogham Stone, Dodging The Rain and in two Poetry In Motion Community anthologies.
Anna Milan
Early-stage menopausal psychosis, Nyhavn hotel room, 5 October 2019 There’s a red eye / in the corner of the ceiling / yesterday it was a smoke detector / today it’s pretending to look elsewhere / seeking out fire The stilettos by the bed listen /...
Rojbîn Arjen Yiğit
Neşûştî / Unwashed unbutton my spine towards the shitty full sounds of istanbul throw my discs at the drunkard as the imam punctures our howls into the mosque lucid green walls may he hang us let us be examples is there anyone who loves like us?...
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Question Mark I live in Question Mark. It’s at the end of the sentence. The road to get here has a sharp bend. It’s not easy to guess what folk who live here think. There’s always a slight doubt. The town itself has a querulous nature; people are...
James Cochran
Dry January I. to be like the box turtle, constantly contained in rigid carapace, opened and closed at will, always at home. to be like the lawnmower run till empty at end of season, no fuel gelling in brittle lines, awaiting fresh gas in spring....
Julian Dobson
Superpower You’d imagine they’d make more of it, that feathered superpower of theirs, leaping across this planet ripe with air. Take the wren: there she hops, perpetually earthed in topsoil and grubs, happiest hidden behind a rock. The sex-crazed...
Solomon Elliott
An Elegy for a Stinking Pigeon I jump at a thud against my window, but nobody’s there. I look into the courtyard and glare, see nothing, until My sight falls upon the pigeon, dead as a dead pigeon, The corpse nestled into the leaves to hide from the wind....
Genevieve Carver
Hysteria say you’re on stage or in Tesco buying tinned fish for the dog or it’s a dream in which you’re arguing with your mother and your womb starts moving about your body like it’s got a mind of its own the Ancient Greeks called it wandering but a better word might...
David Clarke & Julian Stannard on Holocaust Memorial Day
The day the soldiers come they’ll give you twenty minutes to pack. Think now what you’ll need without this place you call home. And remember the woman too stunned by those uniformed men, who smoked and laughed in her kitchen, to use that precious time. She sat...
Trelawney
Chalice You are invited to the special dinner where I’m turning turning the blood on the costume a birthmark shaped like a question on your lips there is a wasp an asp in my milk you would have me fail. Trelawney has been shortlisted and commended in the...