Today’s choice
Previous poems
Iris Anne Lewis
A moonless night when lanterns are shuttered
The track leads through thickets, threaded with eyes.
Elusive scraps of dreams, they gleam, flicker out.
Long dead stars pierce the canopy
with pinpricks of white, cold and exact.
I stumble through woods, the path
thick with leafmould, my footsteps muffled.
Something unseen scuttles in the undergrowth.
A harsh bark, owls’ wings brush the air.
Night retreats, dawn flushes the sky. The sun
splashes through trees, braids dark with light.
Leaves cast dancing shade on the path. I walk on,
the woods lit green and singing.
Iris Anne Lewis is widely published. Featured in Black Bough Poetry and Poetry Wales she has won or been placed in many competitions. Her first collection Amber is available from Amazon or contact her on @irisannelewis.bskysocial or X @irisannelewis.
Jim Ferguson
we can travel anywhere
she winks, but let’s rest here
in amongst these words
a moment can take a while
Gabrielle Meadows
I am tearing the peel from an orange gently and somewhere
Far away a tree falls in a forest and we
don’t hear it but the ground does and the birds do
Hongwei Bao
Every five minutes it does its job,
hoovers every inch of her memory,
declutters all pains and sorrows.
Gary Day
And once the father frowned
As the boy struggled to fasten
The drawbridge on his fort.
‘He’ll never be any good
With his hands’ he declared,
As if the boy wasn’t there.
Royal Rhodes
Perhaps the friends of Lazarus, who died
and slipped his shroud, on seeing him might swoon
or rush to hear the tales of that beyond
they hoped and feared to face.
Dmitry Blizniuk for World Poetry Day
God in his worn, greasy jeans like a car mechanic
is lighting a new life from an old one.
Jeff Skinner
It takes ages. Tell me what it is you’re after
she says, when finally I get through.
Annabelle Markwick-Staff
I devoured the Olympics, filled my mouth
and scrapbook with sticky ephemera.
Charles G. Lauder
beneath night’s skin he unearths raw stones
serrated encrusted enigmatic cold