Today’s choice

Previous poems

Sue Wallace-Shaddad

 

 

 

Tabula Rasa

Rectangular, with corners cut off like an octagon, muddy brown shows through the cream exterior where the edges are chipped. Just the right height for a young child learning to stand. Coloured beakers stacked up ready to be knocked down. A place for card games played at speed, endless cups of tea. Smooth and squat, immovable, it has borne the weight of decades, silent witness to family life, a slab too heavy to lift up.

 

 

Sue Wallace-Shaddad’s pamphlets are: Once There Was Colour, (Palewell Press, 2024), Sleeping Under Clouds (Clayhanger Press, 2023), A City Waking Up (Dempsey and Windle, 2020). Widely published, Sue does readings, writes poetry reviews and runs workshops suewallaceshaddad.wordpress.com

Dharmavadana

She barely glances at you when you chink
your spare coins in her upturned cap, but still
spreads a spell among the pavement footfalls,

Tim Dwyer

      Shedding Annamakerrig It begins high up the chestnut tree with leaves on the twigs on the tips of branches where sap has slowed. Turning amber carried by the breeze they touch the earth, rest on the grass where autumn begins   Tim...

Sandra Noel

The sea happens to me today

not because I’m the woman in the bakers
brusque turned rude
or the peaches              still hard in the bowl