Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sarah Nathan
There’s The Big Things
The ash that screams into the night,
the lake that dries, the child amongst the rubble,
the heat, the fire, the lack of books,
the men who’ve clearly lost their minds.
And then there’s the small. The glass that smashes
on the floor, a relic glazed in blue.
The seedlings devoured in their pots,
the text that rattles round a broken phone,
the children needing less and less,
a sense of being all alone. A backwards glance,
a hurried kiss, left on edge in sweat and fear,
not knowing how to survive at all.
In the night the stomach swells,
and water churns around. A tiny foot
imprints skin, from the inside out.
I’m woken by birds at dawn to this
back-to-front and broken dream
and now you pull away,
umbilicus strained,
a leaf that falls,
a different season yet again.
Sarah Nathan is a teacher and writer from East Lothian, Scotland. She has poems featured in The Dark Horse, Outcrop Poetry, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and forthcoming in The Poetry Lighthouse and from the roots (Glasgow University’s creative writing anthology). When not in the classroom she can mostly be found at the beach.
Julian Dobson
You too I guess
have studied the surviving starlings
as they swoop and whistle
by the snack trailer at Moorfoot
Mark Czanik
I loved the tales Luke told me of starving writers,
and the sacrifices they made following their hearts.
Philip K Dick eating dog food. Bukowski’s candy bars.
Nigel King
My compass – its needle set with a sliver of blue stone – spins and spins. Breath mists my snow
goggles. I wipe them endlessly. Even in these thick seal-skin mitts my hands are frozen. I have been
no place as still as this.
Clare Bryden
seek justice
and you hold
a seashell to your ear
hear
Gail Webb
He cuts. I lie still, teach myself
to dream of St David’s Bay,
seaweed strewn on incoming tides,
surfers slice big waves in half.
Kim Cullen
I pull a dress over my head
calm foggy blue linen
sleeved in lavender,
press frizzed hair
Mark G. Pennington
Vigo in Autumn is still a furnace
the nightjars
roost on ram-tarmacked roads
and hot guapas carrying fish baskets
Ivan McGuinness
Begins
in a bubble
strained by chalk.
Where the brim-full hill cries,
weeping tracks merge
Elizabeth Wilson Davies
There are places in Wales I don’t go: reservoirs that are the subconscious of a people – R S Thomas
Cofiwch Dryweryn, that two-word protest,
white on blood-red background, landscaped in green,