Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gareth Writer-Davies
In the Dales
after John Ashbery
it’s a special kind of empty
the footed earth, saluting the sky
so much to see
I took a photograph of you
posed in the window seat
punchy red slippers
blurring rock and field
the same window in five years?
jenny wren says yes, the crows caw no
what do they know
as days go by
certain details are already hazy
and new succeeds new
as we spread over the vast stone barns
of Swale and Wensley
and there we are, older certainly
walking to the monument
where there is no monument
the upper left corner of the sky
a history of what might have been
Gareth Writer-Davies: Hawthornden Fellow (2019). Shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2014 and 2017) and the Erbacce Prize (2014). Commended in the Prole Laureate Competition (2015) and Prole Laureate for 2017. Commended in the Welsh Poetry Competition (2015) and Highly Commended in 2011. His pamphlet Bodies was published in 2015 followed by Cry Baby in 2017, The Lover’s Pinch in 2018, The End in 2019 and Wysg in 2022.
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
Arlo Kean
we are at a cafe just round
the corner from hampstead
heath & sipping berry sunrise