Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jan FitzGerald
Old Age
What is not to love
when you draw back curtains
and taste clouds
in their newness and innocence
or watch the sky
raise its brass trumpet
in a call to gratitude.
What is not to love about
the air on your skin,
each breath a new miracle
or the sound
of a small bird’s song,
the gift a tree offers
welcoming you back to the world.
Jan FitzGerald is a NZ poet with publication overseas including Atlanta Review, Loch Raven Review, Voegelin View, The London Magazine, The High Window, Allegro, Acumen, Orbis and Gutter. Shortlisted twice in the Bridport Poetry Prize, she has five poetry books published.
Laura Varnam
Queen Wealhtheow: Cup-Bearer I watch her pacing the patterned floor, Passing the cup to punch-drunk brawlers, Side-stepping swords, the too-familiar fumble. A mead-hall manoeuvre so mechanical I can tell: she’s done this before. And tomorrow?...
Brendan McEntee
Deathbed Wisdom The shadow of her arm falls long across the wall. Once, she’d climbed a bald cypress in summer wearing an ivory shift. Once, she’d kissed a stranger in a rainstorm who tasted of bourbon and sea spray. The electric impulse of her...
Ian Heffernan
RESISTANT That dream again, the one I have Most mornings now: a foghorn calls Across the river’s mouth, I scan The grey salt distance, pick out groups Of oystercatchers, dunlins, knots And, here and there, an avocet, Then turn and take the path...
Kayleigh Jayshree
ON BEING GHOSTED BY A FAMOUS MUSICIAN Nobody knew he had a glass eye, but when we were alone he’d pop it in and out, like a cuckoo clock, as a sort of intimate party trick. I was surprised by how real it looked, how it followed you around the...
Rachael Charlotte
When You Are Nowhere I only want olfaction in small doses, off my fingers, sometimes it comes when you are nowhere. This is not a joke. I’m going to ride on the back of a lion and sink my hands into his mane, drive my knees into his ribs for grip,...
Rhiannon Janae
Mother Nature She inhabits here laced in hibiscus dancing through marigolds as she weeps low hymns of sparrow’s song fluorescent forests hugging her body while she gayly frolics through a frog pond brushed barefoot as the water hugs her toes she...
Finn Haunch
Black Carr im I shall not want… Greensleeves shunted through an ice cream truck in the boroughs, & leaf-gagged noise in this snug gorge….under the corporated ruins of Leeds & Bradford, the mayflower is stage-managed here: spectacular fists...
Emily Barker
Red-tailed black cockatoo (Ngoolyark) Kaarak, kaarak The red-tailed black cockatoos call from bleeding limbs of the blooming Marri. Chet, chet, chet, chet They peck the honkey nuts. Hard fruit falls to the boort and bilara of the djarlma floor....
Julian Aiken
The Drowning We slept that summer in the small house Bedded in a meadow of foxgloves and thistles, Just a cry from the ocean -- Everyone knew about the boy Dragged from the water onto the beach, His lungs pumped with kelp and fry -- You’d span the...