Today’s choice
Previous poems
Royal Rhodes
Miles of Memory
The passenger train along the Connecticut shoreline moves as if in a
river of wooden ties and steel rails. It travels through the old
industrial towns like Bridgeport, long ago a manufacturer of brass,
and places settled in New England’s past: Old Saybrook, Groton, and
Mystic. Once I rode north during a quick thunderstorm and witnessed
from the window of a coach car the tangled cables of lightning
attaching the sky to the ground. But mostly my travels were on dry,
calm days when I could look out on sun whitened wetlands and woods,
with occasional glimpses of flocks of boats moored not far from access
to the placid Sound beyond. As I journeyed alone, I saw In the train
window a white stick in the marsh — a rigid egret.
Royal Rhodes is a poet trained in the Classics. His work has appeared in various literary journals in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. He lives in a village near a nature conservancy and a green cemetery. royalrhodes.com
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.
Anne Stewart
Huddled on the cat’s blanket,
hyenas crying through the night.
Scribbled notes regretting tea,
Mark Czanik
I loved the tales Luke told me of starving writers,
and the sacrifices they made following their hearts.
Stephen Chappell
She has a way of tilting your head
as if lining up a thought.