Today’s choice
Previous poems
Alex Josephy
DayGlo
after Ecclesiasticus 44.1
Let us now praise hi-vis men
who gather together
round a pothole, filling the gap
with their sticky black remedy.
Honour the yellow-gilet WPC
who knows how to listen,
called to a bus stop
just in time by a lost girl.
Let’s not forget Poppy the neon
lollypop operative,
nor the parakeet-bright
sanitary goods delivery crew.
Tell the DayGlo doozers
how they light our mornings,
gleaming waterproof orange
through the gloom.
Let’s almost die for love
of the one at the very top
of a crane at the boatyard,
sketching an arc in the sky
when his lime green forearm,
matchstick-delicate
from down here, tilts
a lever, sends a loaded pallet
swinging out above the jetty,
calms it to a standstill,
winches it down slo-mo, exactly
where it needs to go.
Alex Josephy lives and writes in Sussex and Italy. Her pamphlet Again Behold the Stars, was a Cinnamon Press award winner 2023. Her third full collection, A Little Bridge, was published by Pindrop Press in 2025. www.alexjosephy.net
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,
Kay Feneley
Some days I must immerse myself in the waters
These days are more than others
Monday 09.06 – a sewage overflow has activated
David I. Hughes
He does not shout. He charts.
Where treaty lines once hung like old nets,
he inks the deep, the dark, the yet-unmade.