Today’s choice
Previous poems
Antonia Kearton
Elements
On my son’s desk lies
the periodic table of the elements.
I look. Amongst the arcane names
I recognise, easy as breathing,
carbon, oxygen, gold, beloved of kings.
He shows me how it’s laid out – from left to right
by increasing atomic number;
in columns, by similar reaction.
I think of alchemists, the early pioneers
first discovering these elemental secrets;
and Mendeleev, dreamer, scientist, placing
each element in precise and perfect order,
like the notes of a Bach fugue.
My son tells me
there were gaps within the table,
elements predicted, later found,
exactly right. Gods in white coats, now
we hold this map of universal matter in our hands,
and create new elements, each in their proper place
until the table ends.
I think: what if we could order
our lives like this,
emotion along one axis, action on the other,
step by step.
And if there must be absence,
we would know with certainty where it will be,
its shape, its substance,
and what we have to do
to fill it.
Antonia Kearton is an occasional writer of poetry, based in the Scottish Highlands. She has been published in various journals including Dust Poetry, Atrium, Black Nore Review and Northwords Now, and can be found intermittently on Bluesky as @antoniakearton.bsky.social
Sophie Herxheimer and Rishi Dastidar
Join us for a live zoom reading from Sophie Herxheimer and Rishi Dastidar with Support from Kevin Reid in our new occasional 'Live from the Butchery' series, hosted by Helen Ivory and Martin Figura from their home. The reading will take place on Sunday...
Ilhem Issaoui
My unromantic poem for this unromantic time as the world is asleep like a spiral shell or like the maddening stairs It takes time and effort to unfurl It happens naturally though, for most, Through nature's imperative Once we are old, though, we...
Thomas Day
Last Act It felt like the finale: the magic cloak skit bunglingly executed, given the ultimate twist, the audience killing themselves laughing – the master of mistiming surpasses himself. But it lingered on a shade too long: the gurn, the...
Daniel Richardson
Clocking on at the Sawmill After a successful breakfast of flapjacks and black coffee the Buddhist clocking on at the sawmill 250,000 board feet to cut and trim the moon still bright in the sky the sun rising wearing his big red shirt and his...
Z. D. Dicks
Distress call A red tractor hovers over its white rims scalping around small splinted trees and I suppress a sneeze at the green over rust fence as the beast grumbles Under amber pulse flashes in glass skull neon skinned a...
Deborah Harvey reviews ‘Two Girls and a Beehive : Poems about the art and lives of Stanley Spencer and Hilda Carline Spencer’ Rosie Jackson and Graham Burchell
I confess to having a personal interest in the art and the life of Stanley Spencer that is entirely fanciful, born of the fact that he and my grandmother, Hilda, both worked in war hospitals in Bristol during the first world war. ‘They could have met,’ I...
Erika Kamlert
Your other name The river, fat and glistening green, slithers through the city through the church yard, covered in windflowers Their petal confetti tore up winter so that spring arrived empty and unwritten with a naked, confessing light Only oval...
Jenny Edkins
Starlings Dusk, on a winter’s evening, overcast, cold, a stiff offshore wind blowing in from the Irish sea as people emerge from town streets, in twos or threes or solitary, to see this miracle. Small figures muffled to the ears all eyes as the...
Alan Cohen
Of Change and Collaboration Here in the Valley The sun each day Rises over the mountains At a different time in a different place In the East, some say But others see each day is unique And, flexible, cobble a self to suit And so they grow and...