Today’s choice
Previous poems
B. Anne Adriaens
Fancy etymology for a vacant lot
The French term terrain vague enfolds
a plot of land I thought at first was vague,
undefined and malleable. As a noun,
this vague echoes on the edge of its meaning:
perhaps a patch of earth evoking a wave,
capable of conjuring the sea.
I’d picture the nettles, brambles,
dandelions and daisies swaying in the breeze
that precedes the first tide,
that would inch its way in from nowhere
to gently wet the grit and salt the rubble—
until the smell of brittle paper,
old ink and dust, rises from a dictionary:
this is an empty space, a new start. For rubbish
and weeds are matter too, however dismal and
dismissed. We can build a dream on rubble.
B. Anne Adriaens’ work has appeared in various publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Abridged, Poetry Scotland, Stand Magazine and A New Ulster. Her pamphlet Haunt was highly commended in the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition 2024.
Henry Wilkinson
I rolled an orange across daybreak;
I waited for the moon to ripen.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, we bring you KB Ballentine, J.S. Watts and Terry Dyson
as wind whispers your name.
Summer’s breaking down and a starker calling comes –
leaves saturated with sunset before surrendering.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, we bring you Helen Laycock, Ruth Aylett and Debbie Strange
we will meet again
on the other side
On the tenth day of Christmas, we bring you Jenny McRobert, Angela Topping and Maria C. McCarthy
The tree makes its way into the garden
looms at the window, a disconsolate ghost
On the ninth day of Christmas, we bring you Caroline Smith, Bec Mackenzie and David Keyworth
After the lunch he gets his folder
of Christmas games.
On the eighth day of Christmas, we bring you Em Gray, Abigail Ottley and Emma Simon
And now you’re half a spin of the world away,
somewhere I’ve never been, like Narnia . . .
On the seventh day of Christmas, we bring you Sue Burge, Erica Hesketh and Max Wallis
Once there was nothing sweeter than snow
On the sixth day of Christmas, we bring you Amy Rafferty, Tim Kiely and D.A.Prince
We pick up where you left off, searching still,
choosing random cards from a dealer’s deck:
twenty-one crows in a night-time tree,
deep within the dark, with all that chatter
On the fifth day of Christmas, we bring you Paul McGrane, Kevin Reid and Helen Evans
As regular as Santa Claus, she’d call
around at Christmas, the next-door neighbour
and my Sunday school teacher, Mrs Williams.