Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rhonda Melanson
Holy Ground
I imagine my mother pulling apart my praying hands. Don’t be such a holy roller, she’d taunt. Get over here, quit committing to the ethereal, get down on those knees and help your family pick strawberries. The bending made me sulky. The magic of growing things, its tangible beauty, I did not understand. Items to be plucked, washed, diced, plopped into pies and loaves, scooped into freezer bags. No one ever pointed out to me the rootedness of a carrot, pointy and orange, how within the soil, it etched out its own positive space. No one ever demonstrated to me how peas slept soundly in their own alien habitat, spaceship pods, rudely awakened by earthly poachers like me. I would have worshipped them. Extracted their baby knowledge, considered their plucked sacrifice as I consumed them, each little pearl lolling on my tongue. With this knowledge and other pursuits of gardenly delights, I might very well have wrenched back my hands, held within me a berry of fertile prayer:
red as strawberries
exploding seed and colour
spillage most holy
Robert Nisbet
The Fringe For days, weeks, I’d longed quite hard for silence, as the weighted ache of noise loured. Then, Sunday morning, three o’clock, humid morning-night, the window open, there came a silence fringed with scents (our lane half-in, half-out of...
Steph Ellen Feeney
The brief invisibility of fathers I do not draw but here I do. Heavy looping lines. That scar of road. Weeds through the stones. The olive tree, persisting. Wild fennel, and him bent over it. The way that he inhales the leaves. Pours rice like...
John Tustin
We Are Alike We are alike, you and me. We are alike. You die of love, I die of love. You die without love, I die without love. We live to love, We live without love, We live until we die And then You must die alone, I must die alone. You and me,...
Chrissy Banks
The Nearly Times Once, when a group of horses bolted and reared, eyes white, legs flailing, trampling whatever was under their hooves. Once, wheeling too fast on a bike down Richmond Hill, tumbling off. Stilled on the tarmac, a human speed bump....
Kashiana Singh
5 Haiku Origami cradle songs on the drive home… my empty womb * my mother’s knitted sweaters- I unravel knots * tears- water raining into an empty cup * drifting snowflakes- I restore the fragile lace of my wedding veil * encounters- his world is shaped by her...
Adaeze Onwuelo
Every Girl's Dream White egg dress black shoe suit doughnut sugary ring thrown flinty dandruff and white rice copy and pasted vows wedding receptionists are only here for the liquor vacancy signs is their twin eyes a head dress of heaven? A...
Peter Bickerton
Conspiracy theorists As they conspire, I agonise: it’s a glass door sudden at full pelt and that sickness as the wind escapes. Peter Bickerton is a writer, scientist and resident poet for Thought For Food. Peter’s poetry has featured...
William Doreski
Sunday Before the Hurricane The sky looks wary. The trees confer in muffled rustlings. I should start my generator, make sure it’s willing to cough enough power to support me through a rush of wind and rain. Hardy knew about wind and rain, his...
Xan Nichols
Haiku in the hope of an easing of lockdown Sunrise early May all flame and pale duck egg blue; Clouds of lilac grey Just before sunrise - a muted bloom of russet On the chilly ground Above the skyline blazing - the risen sun like a young god Tree trunks east facing...