Today’s choice
Previous poems
Isabelle Thompson
‘Attention, after all is prayer’ (Jo Bell)
We saw a kingfisher threading the bright needle
of his body along the river. We saw a shag, stamping
her prehistoric shadow on the sky. We saw a hobby,
compact, fierce, not a sinew out of place, alert and spare,
watching us from his high vantage. All these were miracles,
but miraculous too was the stag beetle, thick and black,
gleaming against the white snowdrops; miraculous
and strange was the rat in the car park who sat
licking her tiny paws, her soft brown body touched
with beads of rain, her eyes dark as holes, hypnotic,
calling to us to watch her, note her unnoticed loveliness.
Isabelle Thompson is a graduate of Bath Spa University’s MA in Creative Writing, where she now works as a research assistant on programmes related to storytelling. Her debut pamphlet, Stalin’s Parrot, is published in May 2026 by Poetry Space.
May Grier
I wasn’t to know
that it was a three-tusked
beast; that there was not one,
not two, but three
that grew the seed of me.
Daniel Hill
On her first day home, she took
to plucking the sky with tweezers—
latched on to clouds and waited
Sheila Saunders
Which is the subject?
Limp-leaved yucca
reluctantly dying,
the foreground figure
in its stony pot?
Trelawney
What is holding you back from building your wormery?
You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
David Van-Cauter
…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad. . .
Tim Dwyer
Unexpectedly
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air
Paul Moclair
Their shore leave over,
. . . the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again.
Susan Elizabeth Hale
Sometimes words are the only thing
that get you through,
But not the words you think,
not a word like love or hope
those are imprecise.
Seán Street
We lit a candle for you
that day in Sacre Coeur,
under its white-flame dome
as high as Paris could go