Today’s choice
Previous poems
Anne Symons
Magic Pennies
My dad was a magician.
He could make a penny disappear
with a twist of his wrist
just vanish in thin air
to pluck it later
from your ear or nose.
People laughed when dad did that.
He’d put a matchstick
in the centre of a clean white hanky,
his Sunday best
fold the hanky, break the match
get everyone to feel it
before he mended it again.
They all said Oo! When dad did that.
But the best was getting chocolate
from the level crossing
behind the house on Gwinear Road.
Dad put ha’pennies on the tracks
for trains to squash as big as pennies
for the sweetie slot machine.
He was clever like that, my dad.
Anne Symons comes from Cornwall and began writing poetry in retirement. She completed an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University and the Poetry School in London. Her debut pamphlet Shifting Sands, was published by Littoral Press in 2024
Gail Webb
He cuts. I lie still, teach myself
to dream of St David’s Bay,
seaweed strewn on incoming tides,
surfers slice big waves in half.
Kim Cullen
I pull a dress over my head
calm foggy blue linen
sleeved in lavender,
press frizzed hair
Mark G. Pennington
Vigo in Autumn is still a furnace
the nightjars
roost on ram-tarmacked roads
and hot guapas carrying fish baskets
Ivan McGuinness
Begins
in a bubble
strained by chalk.
Where the brim-full hill cries,
weeping tracks merge
Elizabeth Wilson Davies
There are places in Wales I don’t go: reservoirs that are the subconscious of a people – R S Thomas
Cofiwch Dryweryn, that two-word protest,
white on blood-red background, landscaped in green,
Kay Feneley
Some days I must immerse myself in the waters
These days are more than others
Monday 09.06 – a sewage overflow has activated
David I. Hughes
He does not shout. He charts.
Where treaty lines once hung like old nets,
he inks the deep, the dark, the yet-unmade.
Anne Stewart
Huddled on the cat’s blanket,
hyenas crying through the night.
Scribbled notes regretting tea,
Mark Czanik
I loved the tales Luke told me of starving writers,
and the sacrifices they made following their hearts.