Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ivan McGuinness
Bourn Identity
Begins
in a bubble
strained by chalk.
Where the brim-full hill cries,
weeping tracks merge
into an idea of brook:
Letcombe,
until merging with Ock.
Earth accommodates to accumulate,
hollows between course, force and resistance.
Pool falls over rock
riffles
into deeper ways,
cress-beds, crayfish, sticklebacks and bullheads.
Wet footed playground,
skirts tucked up
socks rolled on the bank,
ripple and eddy round skinny white legs,
soft silt cushions tender toes,
nets, jam-jars,
magnified beauties of the deep.
In town, domesticated by brick and stone, after grills and races,
a turning wheel catches life out of the stream, grinds free flow
into value.oMill-tailoooowateroooorelaxesooooafteroooowork.
Ivan McGuinness lives in Oxford, his poetry has appeared in several magazines including Seaside Gothic, The Alchemy Spoon and Dream Catcher.
Penny Sharman
Muscle memory I cut up my plaster cast and buried it deep into the earth. Mystics say if you offer pain to the natural world, it will heal what’s left behind. I prayed out loud when the wind howled and rain cleansed me of grief. Now it seems my...
Bruce Morton
Morton’s Laws Think me not a pessimist, Or, for that matter, a cynic. But my First Law (I don’t Care a fig for Newton) states: If it makes sense it will not Happen. The corollary states: The more sense it makes, The less likely it is to happen....
Oz Hardwick
Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, who has published ten chapbooks and collections, and loads more interesting stuff with other people. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.
For National Poetry Day: The Environment – Marie-Louise Eyres, Jonathan Edis, Kathy Miles
Tinder Box Bugle weed and bee-blossoms catch the sparks and pass the flames lifted by the dry Santa Ana breeze, from black cottonwood to blue oak, down to the shrubs of the chaparral. The wind raises burning embers, fireballs like giant orange...
For National Poetry Day: The Environment – Matt Kirkham, Terry Quinn
Buzzard In the third month of drought we swerved round a buzzard that stood in the road. A hedgerow deep breath for the moment to register, to name the thing. We turned, drove back. In the hazards she was shaded with the forest. Was she stunned?...
For National Poetry Day: The Environment – Ruth Higgins, Laura McKee
Mountain Lover You stand there like someone who left six thousand years ago and I was to blame. You will not speak of your symptoms of being, you couldn’t give a fuck. Always that distant look but I can walk to you in an hour. Your feet — who...
For National Poetry Day: The Environment – Lydia Benson, Geraldine Stoneham, Chris Kinsey
Moor It seeped down from the moor smoke first air laced with flakes of ash dancing then settling on roofs, shoulders, eyelashes we dipped our feet in buckets then travelled—bleach clean— along those footpaths branded into land like stitches...
For National Poetry Day: The Environment – Tristan Moss, David Van-Cauter
An interview with a Cigarette How do you cope? Sometimes, I watch old movies where I am a symbol of rebellion and bike-sheds, of good times had, or a moment of pensive freedom, or a last request. Or I recall when you would call me Gauloises or...
For National Poetry Day: The Environment – Cindy Botha, Olga Dermott
Cindy Botha lives in New Zealand where she began writing after 6 decades of doing other things. She is published in New Zealand, the UK and USA. Olga Dermott has published two pamphlets: apple, fallen (Against the Grain Press) and A...