Today’s choice
Previous poems
Raluca David
Here is a cross
You said you’d never die
here.
Here are your Sundays watching your children’s birthdays
on your screen. Here are your winters crating up grocery trucks,
pineapples scratching rough skin. Here are your summers
slating the roofs of Europe. You said you’d build
behind your elders’ house. A villa, bright orange concrete.
Here is a cross.
Upon the morning mist a divination line, a black bedsheet
a poem in dye, words fold onto each other: Hopes, Home, How
soon. A yellow T-shirt saying Ole Ole Ole. A pair of warm socks.
You will make it through, you know that much.
What through means, you don’t know.
What is on the other side
of through.
Raluca David has been shortlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri NW Prize as well as the Starkie and Dart Poetry Prizes, and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her poetry has appeared in the Oxford Review of Books. Instagram: @ralucafdavid
Khairina Anindya, Genevieve Beech
‘Khair’
At the feet
of al-Ka‘ba
you asked for a daughter.
‘BIRTHLIGHT’
You are ordinary
to the teenager on the bus,
the doctor at our six-week check.
Linda McKenna
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
Abigail Ottley
She remembers the house of her husband He’s not, as they said he is: loathsome, most monstrous. He has a strange and sinister beauty. His eyes are obsidian, shot through with gold, a ruby burning in each. A noble brow, and magnificent cheekbones. You can...
Frank Phelan
I am most visceral
when being disarmed
by a song, a lyric
written and sung…
in the broad New Yawk vowels
Katherine Duffy
The ferry pushes the sea,
forces a long, white reply
that speaks of where we’ve been
Audrey Cotterell
In a corner chapel of the abbey
I lit a small candle, and sent the flame
as a message only half composed
Dylan Foster
there’s not much you can do
when the planets
are telling you to stop
Jeff Skinner
Can’t hear yourself think only the bass line
of a heart thumping. Your head’s clamped.
Chalice Am Bergris
It is not like an egg cracking
or an exquisite shiver of shattered glass.