Today’s choice
Previous poems
Elijah MacBean
My Name is My Name
Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam –
it always had to be Samina.
She said she’d rather be waterboarded
than let her daughter be whitewashed
by whites too conservative to spare
the extra syllables.
Ami never let anyone call me Eli –
it always had to be Elijah.
She said she loved bursting bubbles
of Baby Boomers who thought
Elijah was reserved for blonde-haired boys
with crosses around their necks.
Ami never let anyone misspell our surname –
it always had to be MacBean.
She said the A tethered me,
to my father’s Scottish side,
steady between his body beneath,
and his spirit above.
Elijah MacBean is a mixed-race British Kashmiri-Scottish writer from Accrington, Lancashire.
Nigel King
My compass – its needle set with a sliver of blue stone – spins and spins. Breath mists my snow
goggles. I wipe them endlessly. Even in these thick seal-skin mitts my hands are frozen. I have been
no place as still as this.
Clare Bryden
seek justice
and you hold
a seashell to your ear
hear
Gail Webb
He cuts. I lie still, teach myself
to dream of St David’s Bay,
seaweed strewn on incoming tides,
surfers slice big waves in half.
Kim Cullen
I pull a dress over my head
calm foggy blue linen
sleeved in lavender,
press frizzed hair
Mark G. Pennington
Vigo in Autumn is still a furnace
the nightjars
roost on ram-tarmacked roads
and hot guapas carrying fish baskets
Ivan McGuinness
Begins
in a bubble
strained by chalk.
Where the brim-full hill cries,
weeping tracks merge
Elizabeth Wilson Davies
There are places in Wales I don’t go: reservoirs that are the subconscious of a people – R S Thomas
Cofiwch Dryweryn, that two-word protest,
white on blood-red background, landscaped in green,
Kay Feneley
Some days I must immerse myself in the waters
These days are more than others
Monday 09.06 – a sewage overflow has activated
David I. Hughes
He does not shout. He charts.
Where treaty lines once hung like old nets,
he inks the deep, the dark, the yet-unmade.