Today’s choice
Previous poems
Carolyn Oulton
Autumn Fires
Unexpected as burned stone,
what am I supposed
to do with this memory?
The sudden shuffle of ash,
flames clicking like needles,
grey-cold flags. You there
just now – I can’t be sure
– perhaps about to be?
5 a.m., still curved
like wax on a bottle.
I don’t hear the taxi,
then he’s gone. I’m standing
by the window now,
a boy walks through the rain.
In the kitchen a girl, not well,
strokes her paints on water.
After lunch, rain clings
to the gutters.
A moment and a log
falls sharply, knocking smoke
across the room.
Already I know the grass
is wet outside the window.
Who it is I’m waiting for.
Carolyn Oulton is a Professor of Victorian Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. She teaches on the Creative and Professional Writing BA and is Project Co-Lead for https://kent-maps.online/. Her most recent poetry collection is Accidental Fruit (Worple). @writing_at_CCCU
Sally Evans
Happy Verges These happy verges in rough grass that claimed us, flowers on the weeds where birds’ nests brim with delicate eggs where all adventures end in fields of germinating seeds while I alone forever wander I would not wish this journey...
Jean O’Brien
Crux I was dreaming my real self when I woke with a jolt, had just slipped out of my seventh skin was approaching the nub of the thing. Like a chrysalis from ‘Khrusos’ meaning gold and holding S.O.S within it, I was slowly unpeeling my wings,...
Maggie Mackay
I Keep Dreaming of my Scarab Pendant You know me by my tooth enamel. I am skull, death in gold and malachite, cinnebared by rising suns, blood’s zest. I am woman of silence and feathers, moaning at the king’s touch, screaming to the gods at my...
Jonathan Totman
The Remnants It started with the usual sorts of beautiful trinket - flowers, feathers, pebbles in the rough and wonky shape of things - collected into shoe boxes, or lost beneath the car seat on the journey home. And we didn't think much of the...
Gareth Writer-Davies
The Cutters It's the clatter I hear first of metal tooth biting down scything sharp through the wildings. The most stupid way to die is flaying by hedge cutter. So I wave my arms and jump and the two farmboys with grins like soldiers pause the grinders...
Lucy Dixcart
I Claim This Sky All winter I have kept vigil on these lichen-licked branches, compacting myself like stone. I’ve laid out the bones of my dead, glued my bloodied edges back together, shredded my pages and fed them to the wind – a lost language...
Jared Sagar
Watching the Dead It’s how you remember him most. Under the lampshade with no sound, cobalt slip-ons angled by the chair, hands white as plugs (he’d always question the purpose of winter). It’s how you remember him most. Paints in a fossil box...
Kathryn O’Driscoll
Finishing Touch God chars the edges of the day, the sky turns the colour of the sediment at the bottom of a bottle of cheap orange squash. I imagine it like tea-staining paper to make replicas of old treasure maps as a kid. I remember burning the...
Anna Kirwin
Once it’s gone, it won’t come back Go to your fields And go to your fen. Go to your tiny Patches of scrub. Breathe the green Whilst it lingers still. Go to your trees And breathe in their bark. Feel the ground undulate Free of concrete. Look to...