Today’s choice
Previous poems
George Sandifer-Smith
A Farmer’s Son Watches Galaxies Turn, Groes Bach
Spring 1833 – mists folding their sheets in the fields.
Isaac Roberts feels the turned earth, his father’s
farm an island in the hurtling Milky Way –
splashes of cream across the churning ocean
wearing its distant reds, greens, unintelligible
darknesses. Those tools will cool his hands,
gravity magnetising them the closer he lies,
the flatter he is to the grass. Silage by star
light, all the gods are cloaked – good.
Cows low in the aperture, exposure long
as light years. In the measure of those burning
journeys to our eyes, the long clag of time
between Christmas and New Year, 1888 arrives.
He captures the Andromeda Galaxy in his plates,
shapes every nebula. The sky expands until time ends.
George Sandifer-Smith is a Welsh writer. He has published two collections, Empty Trains (Broken Sleep Books) and Nights Travel at the Right Speed (Infinity Books).
Alan Cohen
Of Change and Collaboration Here in the Valley The sun each day Rises over the mountains At a different time in a different place In the East, some say But others see each day is unique And, flexible, cobble a self to suit And so they grow and...
Miles Salter
Crisps with Robin Hood I almost missed him, with those camouflage trousers on. He was, naturally, in the woods. I had shorts. ‘Are you Robin Hood?’ I asked. He stared for a spell, then nodded. ‘Where’s Merlin?’ I said. ‘And Little Elton?’ He...
Lucy Atkinson
Sunspot I watched her. Persephone. Sunflowers on her dungarees. Breathing in the blackened syrup. London air. She’s trying not to talk about it but she remembers. Winter. There’s Parsley on the windowsill. Planted in a little mug. The only spot in...
Stanley Wilkin
Appearance and Apparition He pirouetted into the room, the lonely dancer With moon-blown hair. Along the way he brushed the sea Gathering it up like dust. Each morning seated on my porch I welcomed his unseen arrival A coffee in one hand a smile...
Rachel Coventry
Clematis My mother loved wild things like clematis, she had respect for anything that disregarded perimeters, to hell with the neighbours and their territorial claims. Maybe that’s more me than her. Oh, you’re a brat she’d say like clematis; an...
John Grey
To a Father I Never Knew Go on, be mostly unexamined. Excuse yourself from history. Hang there on the periphery of consciousness. If you’re okay with that, then fine. But I rate you more important than you do yourself. And I’ll legitimize you...
Lydia Allison
Not Anywhere We did not rollerblade. We did not keep secrets. He was not still in love. I did not bring my telescope and did not know the names of stars. He did not pretend to like the sound of my book. We did not order these. The bones did not...
Sunyi Dean
Dust I have become my mother, always sweeping through the corners of our corners, her broom in search of imperfection to eviscerate. Life is so untidy, but she has found ways to be neat. She picks up all the scattered things left lying,...
Sam Hickford
Familiar Tissue "My father is given to me and I dissect his body. I study him carefully. You ask me where I learn anatomy?" - Stanislaw Szukalski As every sinew, tendon, lies apart I reflect that only, in these loving scrapes will he be at all...