Today’s choice
Previous poems
Syed Anas S
Child’s Innocence in Gaza
We are the ones
who see big crackers
burst every day—
still wondering why
the adults hate crackers.
While everyone loves
simulation games,
we live inside them—
the most real simulation
is the war around us.
There are so many fighters,
flying through the sky,
it feels like an air show.
We wonder why
these things are only for us.
Syed Anas S is a 15-year-old poet from Namakkal, Tamil Nadu. They write poetry that gives voice to those whose stories are too often silenced. Their hope is that their poetry encourages reflection, compassion, and understanding.
Anna Saunders
Telling the Bees Little vials into which the sun has poured I tell you all I know about the failing crop, a marriage party, a stricken cow. Last summer I tied a ribbon to the top of your home, whispered with a sweet tongue that a new master had come....
Andrew Nightingale
How it feels to be a bat There are the headaches, then the feverish sense of darkness. Taste, none but the crackly limbs of gnats. Hate is a constant on the radar and immense blank surfaces block the call by which I come to belong in the shape of a...
David Belcher
A defence against all sabotage I shake out the creases from my coat, and climb the hundred steps leading to the feet of a bronze giant, its right hand raised, welcoming. I’m meant to lift my eyes, to take in its magnificence, to be stirred up into...
Holly Conant
The Slip Hold on tight to my writing hand, darling boy. Who knows how many words I have left. Don’t let me give them all to the page. Holly Conant is a new writer and mature student, currently studying at the University of Leeds. Her poems...
Sidrah Zubair
IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED We have detected a trojan virus! I have developed affinities for dying in peculiar ways such as being choked by the moonlight’s shaking hands or swallowing a cup of live rattlesnake babies Personal and banking information is at...
Jenny Mitchell
Vanishing Mother A jar of Pond’s cold cream glows in amongst her female debris on the dressing table; talc sprinkled with a lipstick smear across a comb. Tissues fluff out of a slit – half-done magic trick beneath a heart-shaped mirror, picturing the...
Caleb Parkin
Ecco the Dolphin Sega Megadrive, 1992 Ecco roves immaculate 16-bit oceans, pierces through jellyfish sparkling their assigned scores. Ecco rotates side on, a perpetual loading icon, flips through scrolling screens of digital habitat. Ecco is neat between...
Antonela Pallini-Zemin
Mix & Match but what if we mixed the smoke of my incense sticks & the smoke of your rolled-up happiness in a room only suitable for two? what if we mixed & matched your hundred fingers with my four fingerprints? what if we let my kundalini...
Cleo Madeleine
do not eat you dry out my tongue, dry off, dry off, wither in my mouth like the ripe white leg of a lamb breach-born, caught dangling between guts and dew, fingers of mist still laid in the valley biscuits in a long cardboard tube sticky with crumbs, the...