Today’s choice
Previous poems
Oliver Comins
Milk break, lunch break
Working the land on good days, after Easter,
people would hear the breaks occur at school,
children calling as they ran into the playground,
familiar skipping rhymes rising from the babble.
An ample fence stood between them and the farm
where their voices entwined with summer air,
sounds of village families, echoes of belonging.
Between the breaks, a country silence rose—
various nestling of feet in grass, a distant thuck
of axe on wood and that sibilance of leaves.
The school is closed now, converted, gone.
There are no breaks to freshen up the days
or disperse the background rumble of transport.
The hills are closing in, their strict rows of pine.
Oliver Comins recently returned to the Midlands after living in the Thames Valley and West London for many years. His poetry is collected by The Mandeville Press and Templar Poetry.
https://templarpoetry.com/
Ellora Sutton
My heart is breaking, so I’m setting up my new Wonder Oven.
The waft of toxicity as I run it on empty for ten minutes
is a welcome distraction.
Erin Poppy Koronis
Naked feet rush
over cold pebbles,
phone-torches light
our pathway to the sea.
Bob King
The first wristwatch was first worn
in 1810, despite what old turn-it-up
Flintstones episodes might have you
believe.
Brandon Arnold
Alone, I drive along the midnight, winter road. My left hand at the 12 o’clock position of the steering wheel. And I coast. I let out the day’s long breath, which started out today as a sigh.
Stephanie Feeney
My mother is here, and might not have been,
so I hold things tighter:
the small-getting-smaller of her
running with my daughter down the beach . . .
Anna Fernandes
My stubby maroon glove spent a chill night
on the velvet ridge of Clent Hills
tangled in summer-dried grasses
Jo Eades
It’s Wednesday and / again / I’m laying pages of newspaper on the kitchen table / tipping up the food waste bin /
Sue Butler
We cultivate the knack
of getting down on the floor and
back up three or four times each day.
JLM Morton
In a dull sky
the guttering flame
of a white heron