Today’s choice
Previous poems
Margaret Baldock
Hurst Reservoir
In the sharpness of a January wind
we stepped down,
feeling with neoprened feet
for the safety of the edge.
Bags and clothes huddled
on a plastic picnic sheet.
We launched, lovingly
into dark and silky water
unknown yet benign.
Bodies at awkward angles.
Heads raised high against
the tiny vicious waves.
Crazy women some might say
but we laughed
with the joy of it, almost cried,
elation our reward for saying:
No! to fear of cold.
No! to fear at all.
Margaret Baldock is a retired NHS project manager whose poetry aims to express spirituality in the concrete everydayness of life. She lives in Derbyshire and practices as a spiritual director.
Gopal Lahiri
From this far-side apartment
you watch jarul leaves darkening with the seasons
Adam Kelly
Determined, you smash against the window
I have to admire you in your striped suit
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
Grace Lynn
Sunlight saunters in long, thin wires through the fallow field
of my bedroom. You approach, a migrating heron
in a runny yolk collar and suntanned shorts, a white-light emissary
of hope. . .
Miriam Swales
I’m waiting for news I don’t want to talk about
and scrolling through old photos to escape.
After some swipes, I see you walking away.
Chris Hardy
The night before we left we smoked opium
for the first time and didn’t sleep.
Angela France
Perhaps some small creature fallen
from where it should be. I am unsure
whether I saw it move.
Adam Horovitz
We cannot update you yet, other than to say we are caught
in a doldrums between stations and that your father can wait
as he has been waiting these past two years . . .
Sue Spiers
A woodpigeon calls
his five-note matins.
Petals ratchet wide
as the sun rises.