Today’s choice
Previous poems
Patricia Minson
Wood Anemone
Between the trees dust shifts,
light fractures like a prism.
A cathedral silence greens the air.
The soil smells of damp books.
I see them — paper-thin,
spreading on the dark floor of the wood.
Still as a shut door.
Nothing moves —
not the nettles,
not even a rumour
of someone once there.
A nudge of wind tips
each flower cup.
They twitch, then settle …
like sleeves lined with lullabies.
White flicker. Then nothing.
No miracle. No change.
Just wind.
Just petals.
Just the usual business of vanishing —
a dry kind of wanting.
Patricia Minson is a writer and poet based in West Cornwall. Her work explores themes of inheritance, grief, and class, blending domestic detail with lyrical intensity. She was placed third in the 2025 Crysse Morrision Poetry Prize (Frome Festival), Highly Commended in the 2025 Wirral Poetry Festival Open Competition, and had two poems Commended in the 2025 South Downs Poetry Competiton.
Jim Murdoch
and I said,
“I understand,”
and I did, ishly . . .
Sue Spiers
Thirsty Shadow
the kind of being
that won’t post
an image
Julian Dobson
Street after street, ears bright to bass and tune
of two thudding feet, gradients of breathing. But rain
is brooding. Sparse headlights, ambient drone
of cars kissing tarmac, merging
Oliver Comins
Working the land on good days, after Easter,
people would hear the breaks occur at school,
children calling as they ran into the playground,
familiar skipping rhymes rising from the babble.
George Turner
Some days, the privilege of living isn’t enough.
The weight of the kettle is unbearable. You leave the teabag
forlorn in the mug, unpoured.
Craig Dobson
Slowly, ordinarily, the unimaginable happens,
lowering the past into the dark,
covering it.
Clive Donovan
If I were a ghost
I think I would shrink
and perch on wooden poles
and deco shades – get a good view
of what I am supposed to be haunting
Rose Ramsden
We left the play early. It was the last day before the start of secondary school. Dad told me off for slapping the seats
Seán Street
There was a time when I took my radio
into the night wood and tuned its pyracantha
needle along the dial through noise jungles
to silent darkness at the waveband’s end.