Today’s choice
Previous poems
Emma Page
Patience
I grow shoots, acid green;
climb the walls,
surprise myself.
I dream of the way
I would fall,
the axe’s half-diamond.
In the greenhouse,
light and water
make me tall, and
my tremulous leaves
scrawl love-letters
on the windowpane.
Emma Page lives in south-east London and works in a sixth-form college. Her work has appeared in Poetry London, iamb and The Best British Poetry 2011 and her pamphlet Lives of the Young Saints was shortlisted for the 2021 Cinnamon Prize.
A W Earl
Doors
My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors,
where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk
or clutter to rest themselves upon.
Finola Scott
Winter dusk soughs in, dark
clouds threaten, tangle her wool.
Huw Gwynn-Jones
Black is the colour inside black light on
blackened brick and slats
Clare Morris
Necessity, that scold’s bridle, held her humble and mean,
So that she no longer spoke, just looked –
Her world reduced to a search for special offers . . .
Alison Jones
Mrs Norris had thought ascension
would be whirligig rides in bright violet rays,
as the training books all implied.
Sandra Noel
The tide unpleats from her godet,
zig-zags in running stitch
round the base of the côtil.
Matthew Caley
supposedly: if I am to render
‘a man’ then
this ‘man’ must I guess resemble me‹›
Jenny Robb
The nun in charge of the children is thin, her back straight as punishment.
Ken Evans
You try doing star-jumps, steps,
or squats, in knee-high wellies.