Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jena Woodhouse
Granules in the Hourglass
Syllables cascade through time,
granules in an hourglass,
to recombine, cohere into
a word, a phrase, poetic line.
Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.
We think we make our language sing:
our mother tongue gave us the song;
we, too, are particles of time,
free-falling; crucibles of mind.
Jena Woodhouse‘s unpublished poetry collection, Tidings from the Pelagos: a Polyphony was shortlisted in the Greek-based Eyelands International Book Awards 2024. Her forthcoming collection is The Singing Ship: a Study in Resistances, to be published by Calanthe Press, November 2025. She lived and worked for a decade in Greece, and has spent time in many other countries of Eastern and Western Europe.
Stewart Carswell
Earthworks West Kennett I migrate back to this farmland where the level of the corn field has been distorted by the earthen mound facade of a house that swallows the dead and has for centuries. On a ledge inside the entrance, in the human-summoned...
Maurice Devitt
Some things never change Before I went to school one day I hid it under the bed, forgot about it for years. Then, when I met you, something triggered so I dusted it off, placed it in the centre of the kitchen table. You hardly noticed – just...
Peter Bickerton
Charge Sleeping in doorways, they huddle against the cold; plunge the needle tip. Searching for a vein, while others crave a socket; plug-in heroin. Waiting for a plane, they hug the corridors; hooked to the drip. Peter Bickerton is...
Sarah Passingham
The Machinist (Put Something of Yourself into Your Work) The hum and buzz of faster machines buoy her. Decides brightness should be her default. She unwraps a blood-red cuff from her wrist, smoothes it onto the metal bed of her Jones Imperial....
Rebecca Gethin
Rocks without names I watch the silence out there through the hurly gush of Atlantic and tide swashing at everything I mean, if I could find words. I keep hearing it say nothing to me. The moon shining on white flecks of rock in the cliff face...
Ben Banyard
Neutropenic I enter through the airlock, wearing a blue paper gown, hands still damp. There’s a low window which gapes incredulously at concrete slabs with weeds oozing between them, a bare tree, an after-thought of grass. Beside the window, an...
John Vickers
* The syringe should never vacate The arm it pierces Growing into white blossom, tied around A finger, it displays its own idleness A presentiment Pulling up a fruity plasma Of the unhomely John Vickers has published over 60 poems in...
Clare Marsh
Bed Blocker ~ 8/7 An early morning call summons me north to your death-bed. Delayed by London’s chaos after yesterday’s bombs I arrive too late. Mary has kept vigil through the night, soothed and reassured you, arranged for Mum, also in-patient,...
Robert Boucheron
John At the Food Lion south of town, at the express checkout, the clerk’s name pin reads “John.” In his thirties, thin, in black pants and a blue polo shirt, the store uniform, John has a shaved head and a scar that runs from his left ear up over...