Today’s choice
Previous poems
Helen Frances
Grief
I wasn’t in, so she left me a note.
Each word a tangle of broken ends, some oddly linked
to the next with a ghost trail of ink
from her rose-gold marbled fountain pen,
a rare indulgence she’d bought herself.
I think I’m about finished,
the note began. Typical of her, that
starting at the end, I mean. As if no-one
could be interested in what went before.
You’ll find I’ve left a heap of roots in the barrow
bindweed and ground elder, mostly.
You’ll want to burn them, I expect, but
whatever you do, don’t put them in the compost.
I nail her words to the garden fence
and grief unmoors me.
Writing has always been part of Helen Frances‘ life, mostly on nature and philosophical themes. She lives in Somerset on the side of a hill, with views across aeons of geological history where small villages squat like tents at a festival.
Bel Wallace
Month by month I felt my muscles harden
these hefty horns grew from my long skull
Stephen Keeler
Something about arriving somewhere new
just as afternoon is leaving . . .
Geraldine Stoneham
The silence and peace of this place
creeps through on birdsong.
Emma Lee
The instruction invites overthinking:
describe your hometown through
the medium of simple sentences
Vanessa Napolitano
I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive,
ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not
something I know how to cook.
David Forrest
I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other.
Neil Fulwood
Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift
has hacked the WiFi password
in the ear canal and now I’m looping back
endlessly to a misheard lyric . . .
Ira Lightman
Laid down, his upraised face is
White – offputting – on a plumped pillow.
Dave Wynne-Jones
“The all-consuming passion
is rarely found
more than a recipe
for misery,”
you read