Today’s choice
Previous poems
Iris Anne Lewis
A moonless night when lanterns are shuttered
The track leads through thickets, threaded with eyes.
Elusive scraps of dreams, they gleam, flicker out.
Long dead stars pierce the canopy
with pinpricks of white, cold and exact.
I stumble through woods, the path
thick with leafmould, my footsteps muffled.
Something unseen scuttles in the undergrowth.
A harsh bark, owls’ wings brush the air.
Night retreats, dawn flushes the sky. The sun
splashes through trees, braids dark with light.
Leaves cast dancing shade on the path. I walk on,
the woods lit green and singing.
Iris Anne Lewis is widely published. Featured in Black Bough Poetry and Poetry Wales she has won or been placed in many competitions. Her first collection Amber is available from Amazon or contact her on @irisannelewis.bskysocial or X @irisannelewis.
Stephen Kingsnorth
Release This prisoner, isolation wing, wounded, clipped, in stutter nest, unfettered need, communicate, beyond the clamp, a grind of teeth, stumped, just left, ignored, but there. Light all night, the clock reset, sidereal, side-tracked from norm,...
Jakob Angerer
Places Other People Live Orange hilltops in nice winters glimpsed through wet windows on quiet mornings with safe people tiny lights glint at night, illuminate a friendly darkness where people come home in nice cars. Rainy days spent indoors or...
Marta Wolny
Can’t Name Trees Either Plastic spoons, no bellies to show for, scooping the cream left unswallowed, strew the pavement like bird food. Who’s to say it’s unnatural? Street parties are well straddled heaving from recycling bins, We were thrown, we...
Julie Stevens
Zip Wire to Freedom (after Simon Armitage) I write in praise of air. It was just me clothed in a translucent glide, dressed as a thunderbolt, blurry-eyed holding the sky in my hair. To the top in shocking daylight, then helped to lie face down. I...
Sarah L Dixon
To Frank, on going to High School Be bold and push open doors. Embrace the subjects that thrill you. Maths. Drama. Art. Endure those you hate and do them well. History. Literacy. Dance. Life is about balance. Find your tribe. The weird ones. The...
Louisa Campbell
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Rebecca Gethin
Dead-spit My father kept what little he had of my mother in a drawer. It branded his next wife as second. She tipped the contents onto a fire she’d lit in the garden – photos with deckled edges, wedding pictures in card sleeves, snaps of my...
Philip Dunkerley
Medlar Jelly This is going to be a pre-Raphaelite poem about the fruit of the medlar tree that grows in parterres by the West Wing. They leave the fruit long on the tree so that it can blet (good word) to its heart’s content. Then the gardeners...
Dominic Weston
Dead Graham Amuses Himself Dead Graham stands in the doorway eating a family pack of Tyrell’s crisps my crisps Dead Graham isn’t a ghostly thing ghosts were at least alive once he never was Who’s had all my vintage Cheddar? Dead Graham smirks from...