Today’s choice

Previous poems

Sharon Black

 

 

 

Free Range

My thoughts are skittish,
peck at whatever they find.

I flick each whitewash flake
into the bin. Shadows on the walls

are darkened rooms
in which I lose myself, daily:

if I say that I look for this
at the edge of every brightness

would you hand me a prescription?
The house is rustling, I can’t get out.

I have a tongue for truth
and a tongue for lies. My mouth

is dry, all this barking. People say
I have something of the fox.

 

 

Sharon Black is from Glasgow and lives in the Cévennes mountains in France. Her fifth full collection of poetry, Things That Fruit in Darkness, was published in May 2026 by Vagabond Voices. She is editor of Pindrop Press.  www.sharonblack.co.uk

Daniel Sluman

just as the night sky shifts
beyond the minds

of the animals outside

the ceilings
we are pressed beneath change

in aspect & colour

Farah Ali

Notes from nature on how to survive this:
 
1. Learn crypsis and mimesis be a gecko or a mossy frog
 
2. Method actors sway like dead-leaf mantises on branches

Helen Finney

At my feet the window sprawls a view of kneaded land,
craggy baked by the hand of the gods, dusted green
with short bit grass.