Today’s choice
Previous poems
Audrey Cotterell
A November anniversary
In a corner chapel of the abbey
I lit a small candle, and sent the flame
as a message only half composed
to somewhere I hardly believed in.
Room is restricted on the ferry:
six cars, a few pedestrians and dogs,
all of us looking across the water
at the estuary’s other bank coming closer.
Even if the river’s unwrinkled, the crossing smooth
and it doesn’t take too much waiting
to get to the opposite side
lighting a candle is never straightforward.
Audrey Cotterell lives in Sussex. Her work was long listed for the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2024, and has been published in London Grip.
Jane Frank
The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen
but that I will learn to expect
and there’s a fracas-induced full moon
Clara Howell
The way a halved peach breathes, then rots
from the inside out.
Luigi Coppola
Out of ten bars, by the fifth, half of us had flickered
out and by this ninth one, it ended up just him
and me. A matchstick balanced on a stool, he sat
Jon Wesick
Loaded with hawks’ cries and horses’ huffs
Ennio Morricone’s score wails
Paula R. Hilton
When the genie appears, I’m in a frivolous
mood. First request? My mom’s apple pie.
Alice Huntley
slack in a bag from the freezer aisle
shaken out like shrunken grey memes
I long for the podding of beans
Rhonda Melanson
The magic of growing things, its tangible beauty, I did not understand.
Clive Donovan
I go to the top of the risen hill,
above the trees, beyond the grass,
where only hard ground lives
Gary Akroyde
We searched for it
through the tarmac in every rain-bruised sky
in dark Pennine shadows where great mills
spewed out ringlets of ghost-grey fog