Today’s choice

Previous poems

Matt Bryden

 

 

 

Killing Time

at the cider farm, eight minutes
before handover, we strike on
feeding the donkeys – and sprint
towards the orchard, only realising
in the 5:23 dusk that
this is winter, the boughs fruitless,
donkeys stabled – that
beside ourselves and a motorhome
this car-park belongs to that
scrap of feathers
and scramble into air
as, in two lines of three, six ducks take flight.

 

 

Matt Bryden is a teacher and father living in Devon. His most recent publication is The Glassblower’s House (2023, Live Canon). He is Royal Literary Fellow at the University of Exeter www.mattbrydenpoetry.co.uk

Peter Leight

There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .

Ansuya Patel

Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.