Today’s choice
Previous poems
Lucy Heuschen
Matred
After the medieval “Noah plays” of Chester, York and Towneley.
Noah’s wife is traditionally not named in religious texts.
The name Matred comes from a novel by Madeleine L’Engle.
It is known: a woman like that
brings evil on board.
Look at her, pushing forward, all shriek
and clinging skirts, ticking off
the ways Noah is getting it wrong.
Imagine, close quarters, a year at sea.
Shrew would work, for the galley
is full to bursting with such beasts.
Or nag. No, because what kind of man
abandons his mare, even one like her?
Goad, maybe. Short spear. Or say
she reported visions. Saw herself alone,
skin-soaked, and a flock of women
keening for a world gone under.
Leave out that Noah laughed
in her face before the deluge came.
How she knew he’d drag her
by rain-knotted hair
her protest
drowning in her throat.
Lucy Heuschen has appeared in The High Window, The Storms, Ink Sweat & Tears, Obsessed By Pipework, Lighthouse, Skylight 47 and several anthologies. The author of two previous chapbooks, Lucy’s debut collection will be published by Yaffle Press. www.lucyheuschen.co.uk.
Rowan Lyster
Weatherproof In the weeks before the windows arrive from northern Norway, where they really understand triple glazing, the house is porous. Puddles form and evaporate on the flagstones, laundry is trailed straight through casements, clouds are...
Vicki Morley
Weather Gods Winter arrived early in 1443. Prickling air laden with ice needles sweeping down the lagoon snow blankets shutting out light. Galleys half-finished abandoned. I fled from noise of cracking timber hulls my eyelashes matted with snow. I...
Jeremy Proehl
The Candlemaker’s Office was sparsely filled. The worn brass door knob — a patina countless hands slipping over its surface, polished and discolored by each touch. That oak door — turning my wrist lean into it fighting the rub door against frame...
Padraig Rooney
Making is finding, troubadours know Making is finding, troubadours know, and all that comes to hand is an oarlock socket worn by salt, its oar somewhere freely parting water and a pilgrim soul finding rhythm. Have him push the boat ashore at...
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
Workshop exercise For Kate Foley The river twinkles on my right. I’m walking briskly past a pair of disused shipyards whose noisy histories have been condensed to fit on plaques as neat as boiler-plates. The river’s banks are fidgety with ripples...
Philip Rush
The Last Carthusian The large metal bell with which I call myself to prayer is wanted by a museum. I sing in an affected accent the responses to the psalms but the jackdaws which laugh at me from the roof are not fooled. In a refectory which is...
Julia Stothard
Heartland I am growing grass inside my ribs; fluted blades twisting their leading edge in meadows of flesh. There are fields of this. Where the lark has left, the wind gusts through – I have become its hollow short-cut and you are corridors...
Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana
Realisation about a friend slowly and deliberately you draw information out of me the way my son eats a strawberry holding firmly onto the green stem sucking it down to the pulp Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana lived in Japan for 10...
Liz Lefroy
Egg Inside, it’s containment: a smooth shell curving away into itself, taut around a thin membrane which closes on its viscous, one-celled strength; and it’s a silent circling of mass, unused to air, unexposed to the risk of strange heats, to the...