Today’s choice
Previous poems
Elizabeth Barton
On Diamond Hill
I didn’t
think of you once
as I climbed
past stunted willows
straggles of gorse
there was
no burning bush
but when
light poured through
each stone step
glittered
and I heard
crystals of song
spilling
from pipits’ throats
it wasn’t
until I got back
that I sensed
I’d met you
half-way up
where the ghost grass
quivered
and I recognised
your voice
in the chanting
of wind
on the moor
and my tears
welled up
like bog water
Elizabeth Barton is Stanza rep for Mole Valley Poets and facilitate creative writing workshops, such as a forthcoming one entitled, Portals into the Psyche: how fairy tales can enrich our writing. Her debut poetry pamphlet, If Grief were a Bird, was published in 2022 by Agenda Editions. Glimpses of Wilderness, a collaborative book of tanka poetry, art and natural history, was launched just before Christmas.
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.
Patrick Wright
It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.
William Collins
We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.