Today’s choice

Previous poems

Hannah Linden

 

 

A Philosophy of Light

Formed into darkness
an octopus squeezes around
the spaces of a shipwreck.

Light from the bloodmoon
reddens the water and the octopus
adapts and bleeds. The Earth

hadn’t planned to block the sun.
The moon can’t help how it affects
an octopus or that it seems

a particular way sometimes. Planets
follow their orbits. Moons circle
their planets. An octopus

makes sense of it as best it can,
its heart in all its tentacles,
makes its home wherever it can.

 

 

Hannah Linden won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, 2nd Leeds Peace Poetry Prize 2024 and other prizes. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. BlueSky: @hannahl1n.bsky.social

Alison Patrick

A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters . . .

Julie Egdell

At the shore of impossibility
last moments come to nothing
all our plans die in the salt air
of another new day on the black sea.