Today’s choice
Previous poems
Elizabeth Loudon
Forty (for Maryna)
The first three days of war
have a surprising holiday feel.
No deadlines, just the giddy gasp of shock.
Ordinary life continues.
The girl in white socks in the flat downstairs
plays a prelude then turns, pleased,
to an audience of one, who awakes
as if from a deep sleep
and manages to applaud.
Later, you hear sirens and grab sugar lumps
for the baby, throw slippers to your father
who can’t tie his shoes.
In the tunnels you sit close together for warmth.
Nobody sings. In the cold you realise
you left your favourite red jacket on the bus,
but this is no time for tantrums
when there are boys face down,
all for a few square metres of mud,
who were once face down upon you.
It takes forty nights to become accustomed
to anything that strips you to the core:
a difficult birth, cold-eyed jailor,
our failure to come to your rescue.
The little green light beside your name
still said available. Any earlier,
we’d have screwed up our entrance.
It’s not easy, either, sitting on the side-lines
and stroking the lithium-lit news, over and over.
It looks like we’re smiling.
We’re not. It’s what our faces do
when they hurt, stuffed with words
that are hard to spit, harder to swallow.
If you’d only feel sorry for us.
Elizabeth Loudon is a poet and novelist living in southwest England after 25 years in the US. She writes about violence, loss and displacement, and mothers and daughters. When not writing, She’s mostly outside. There’s more at www.elizabethloudon.com.
Miles Salter
Crisps with Robin Hood I almost missed him, with those camouflage trousers on. He was, naturally, in the woods. I had shorts. ‘Are you Robin Hood?’ I asked. He stared for a spell, then nodded. ‘Where’s Merlin?’ I said. ‘And Little Elton?’ He...
Lucy Atkinson
Sunspot I watched her. Persephone. Sunflowers on her dungarees. Breathing in the blackened syrup. London air. She’s trying not to talk about it but she remembers. Winter. There’s Parsley on the windowsill. Planted in a little mug. The only spot in...
Stanley Wilkin
Appearance and Apparition He pirouetted into the room, the lonely dancer With moon-blown hair. Along the way he brushed the sea Gathering it up like dust. Each morning seated on my porch I welcomed his unseen arrival A coffee in one hand a smile...
Rachel Coventry
Clematis My mother loved wild things like clematis, she had respect for anything that disregarded perimeters, to hell with the neighbours and their territorial claims. Maybe that’s more me than her. Oh, you’re a brat she’d say like clematis; an...
John Grey
To a Father I Never Knew Go on, be mostly unexamined. Excuse yourself from history. Hang there on the periphery of consciousness. If you’re okay with that, then fine. But I rate you more important than you do yourself. And I’ll legitimize you...
Lydia Allison
Not Anywhere We did not rollerblade. We did not keep secrets. He was not still in love. I did not bring my telescope and did not know the names of stars. He did not pretend to like the sound of my book. We did not order these. The bones did not...
Sunyi Dean
Dust I have become my mother, always sweeping through the corners of our corners, her broom in search of imperfection to eviscerate. Life is so untidy, but she has found ways to be neat. She picks up all the scattered things left lying,...
Sam Hickford
Familiar Tissue "My father is given to me and I dissect his body. I study him carefully. You ask me where I learn anatomy?" - Stanislaw Szukalski As every sinew, tendon, lies apart I reflect that only, in these loving scrapes will he be at all...
Jenny Moroney
Part We didn't expect it to snow but look it falls in soft flakes. Alone now, we leave the cottage between white folds and aim at mountains. You walk ahead: a gap, I leave and over your footprints, I press my own. We follow the stream winter has...