Today’s choice
Previous poems
Chris Hardy
Memento Vivere
We lived here once.
The rain we heard
fell everywhere.
Silence except the wind
across the ground.
It’s best to keep quiet.
Words are like dead seeds,
they vanish when they’re said.
*
New Year’s Eve
without stars or moon.
I believe they are there
in their own light.
Faith goes deeper
than knowledge.
It is dawn for any soul awake
around the farthest star.
*
Sometimes if you can find it
life is worth the work.
The future’s always young,
we get younger by the minute.
Here and now goes quickly,
where is it?
Soon instead of moving away
the horizon will turn back
and pull the sky down like a lid.
Remember to live.
Chris Hardy has lived and travelled all over the world and is now in Sussex. His poems have won prizes and been widely published. His last collection, Key to the Highway, was published by Shoestring Press.
Andrea Small
a flower is not a heron
does not stand on one leg
spear-billed over golden carp
Usha Kishore
At dawn and dusk, my father
becomes a chant, that flies above
the courtyard of the old house
Jane Frank
The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen
but that I will learn to expect
and there’s a fracas-induced full moon
Clara Howell
The way a halved peach breathes, then rots
from the inside out.
Luigi Coppola
Out of ten bars, by the fifth, half of us had flickered
out and by this ninth one, it ended up just him
and me. A matchstick balanced on a stool, he sat
Jon Wesick
Loaded with hawks’ cries and horses’ huffs
Ennio Morricone’s score wails
Paula R. Hilton
When the genie appears, I’m in a frivolous
mood. First request? My mom’s apple pie.
Alice Huntley
slack in a bag from the freezer aisle
shaken out like shrunken grey memes
I long for the podding of beans
Rhonda Melanson
The magic of growing things, its tangible beauty, I did not understand.