Today’s choice
Previous poems
Christopher M James
Aberfan
The hillside had continued to spill
onto the hand-digging first responders.
Cliff Michelmore, in stark black and white,
his words threading, stitching,
beside himself with grief.
My mother never cried so much.
She’d had the two of us, had learnt
how children bury their riddles, how love
unearths them. Upstairs, my uninhabited bed,
cold as empty storage, safe as houses.
I gazed at the wall shadows, gently
swaying, memory-less, alive,
hearing all the voices calling out again
across the levelled land. Then
the moonlight’s beautiful hanging hand
and the stars which called me lodger.
Christopher M James, lives in the Dordogne, France. He has been published in Acumen, Magma, Orbis, Dream Catcher, London Grip, Poetry Salzburg, The London Magazine, amongst others. He has also been widely anthologised, and has won various competition prizes: Sentinel, Yeovil, Poets meet politics, Wirral, Hastings, Stroud….
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Not the boring twin.
Not even benign.
This is a proper island:
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Dilys Wyndham Thomas
we walk through the exhibition hall lost
amongst water-logged bones, a sunk haul lost
Ruth Lexton
It is late at night and the kettle is boiling,
a quire of steam fanning out in the white kitchen
you are holding me as if I were your girl again
Stewart Carswell
It’s the house at the end.
White paint flakes off the front gate,
wood rots beneath.
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Hey cat, you’re doing really well,
three fields stalked and only one to go.