Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sophie Lankarani
Dear Iran
after Sholeh Wolpé
Even though I only once traced your streets with my own feet,
you wandered into my dreams anyway
sliding in through my grandmother’s stories,
drifting out of the steam of her afternoon tea
searching for a place to land.
You slipped in from the clatter of spoons
against crystal tea glasses,
from the rustle of pistachios in a bowl,
from the smell of warm barbari bread.
You crawled across the living room rug
with its deep red blossoms,
and settled in the hollow of my throat
like an unfinished sentence.
I thought you were gold, Tehran,
and pomegranate-red, bursting with juice,
spice merchants crushing saffron threads
between their fingertips,
the air thick with sumac and smoke
and the hum of bargaining voices.
I dream of you, Tehran, I dream
every night with the ache
of someone trying to read
a language she was never taught.
I searched for you in the slope of my nose,
the olive of my skin.
But I cannot come to you.
You stay sealed behind headlines and rumors,
across news screens and phone calls,
behind the constant warning
“Not now. It’s not safe.”
And so you live inside me instead
a place I carry like a hidden heirloom,
glimmering in the dark.
A city I cannot visit
but that pulls at me anyway,
calling my name
like a prayer in a language I don’t understand
but somehow already know.
Sophie Lankarani is an Iranian-American writer whose poetry explores inheritance, displacement, and memory through Persian imagery and landscape. Her work reflects on cultural fracture, migration, and belonging.
Note: This poem was recently selected as the First Place Winner of the Sherry Pruitt Award by the North Carolina Poetry Society, and will be published in their Pinesong anthology.
Abigail Ottley
My Albatross and Me my albatross is an over-stretched suitcase spilling out stuff I must remember my albatross was small but she grew like Topsy now she will not fit back in her box my albatross is a story, a black and white movie, a steam train...
Mark Totterdell
Containers From on this cliff top, I can clearly see the quarter-mile-long ship across the bay, a dark shape of unseen complexity. I am a sack of bags, with tubes that go between them, and with fine wires everywhere. I am the mind that feels this...
Sue Spiers
Rapprochement (Glosa) Maybe it happens one night, driving Through an unknown suburb, the realisation That nothing is going to change, the time Will never come for explanation – Too Late by Ruth...
Linda McKenna
Into the Forest Some of the liveries…are of people who do service so that they receive them as wages, such are the custodians of the palaces, the guardians of the royal temples, the pipers, the seizers of wolves… The Dialogue of the...
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?...