Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sue Norton
Summer’s End
Today I tipped the packet of coffee
into the cafetiere instead of the tin.
Caught myself in time, didn’t pour water in.
I’ve started to write notes to myself:
Shut bathroom window. Lock back door.
Yesterday at the bank I couldn’t remember
mini statement but I can recognise
this orange blur, this hover of wings
above abelia grandiflora, a hummingbird
hawk moth exploring the tube-flowers
with its long tongue. I sip my coffee.
Old age comes tapping up my garden path
on unsteady feet, but I’m content to watch
a flycatcher flitting up and back, up
and back to its perch on the fence post,
the hawk moth probing
trumpet by trumpet as it siphons
nectar’s last drops,
the flycatcher fluttering up to snatch
one more feed at summer’s end,
preparing for migration.
Sue Norton has had poems published in various magazines and anthologies.
Rob A. Mackenzie
Everything is moving. I have to remind myself
it’s a flat canvas and behind it a wall that’s solid
as I am.
Melanie Branton
A vixen or a reason. A
rave. No air, no sex, nor
Charlotte Oliver
On a bench outside Next,
a punctured woman
traces circles in the air with
a pale finger
Peter Devonald
He is bitterest regrets,
dark chocolate, olives and kale,
The Telegraph and Magritte’s
pipe, the treachery of images.
Anne Ryland
Restless two-hundred-year-old village elder,
a ragged playground of words, or is it weeds –
fragments of chant to slaps of skipping rope.
Colin Dardis
I have never climbed a tree,
never broken a bone
and will never walk on water.
May Garner
The house keeps score
in places no one checks any longer.
Sally Spiers
Night’s white noise is over. Day arises
to stillness. Light crouches behind windows
Tim Brookes
In the charity shop I try on a coat
flocked with fake shearling,
shaved-soft almost: fibres
fired onto plastic to fool the wrist.