Today’s choice
Previous poems
Cáit O’Neill McCullagh
And when you step into the clearing
there will be dancing. The unsteady moon, shaken
to ribbon; shimmering through regalia of clouds. Shawls,
as if ermine, still scurrying (wee winter-whitened weasels).
& the one elm sways too. Lit, like a many-armed Durga.
You think a tree can be stilled by soil? That roots would
drown a soul in ground? Stay your sights, even as body
sends you circling. Look, un-giddied. Remain: forward
& centre. Pasts done & undone. You, the rhythm of quake.
Waken. Clear forest from your feet. Listen. It will be your
name calling & you hearing it spoken, for the first time.
Cáit O’Neill McCullagh‘s debut collection The Bone Folder was shortlisted for The Saltires, in 2025; the year she won the McLellan Prize. Living with cancer, at home in the Highlands, she is writing her next collection (TBP 2027). See @kittyjomac and www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org
Toby Cotton
A blustery day –
the wind too strong for kites
or for lifts to the sky.
“To a thoughtful spot,” it cites
and pins me to the earth.
Ansuya Patel
except this burnt red vase.
Hand shaped in the muffled roar,
devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth.
Hannah Ward
Look, Drew, the
plums are in
pieces beneath
us. I dreamt:
Andrea Small
a flower is not a heron
does not stand on one leg
spear-billed over golden carp
Usha Kishore
At dawn and dusk, my father
becomes a chant, that flies above
the courtyard of the old house
Jane Frank
The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen
but that I will learn to expect
and there’s a fracas-induced full moon
Clara Howell
The way a halved peach breathes, then rots
from the inside out.
Luigi Coppola
Out of ten bars, by the fifth, half of us had flickered
out and by this ninth one, it ended up just him
and me. A matchstick balanced on a stool, he sat
Jon Wesick
Loaded with hawks’ cries and horses’ huffs
Ennio Morricone’s score wails