Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sally Spiers
Windless Day
Night’s white noise is over. Day arises
to stillness. Light crouches behind windows,
presses through chinks. Dawn’s chorus
conceals a speck of silence that casts a shadow
stretching vast across the floor.
Double-checking in the cereal bowls, Day reveals
emptiness disguised as a cornflake. A stale
sandwich left overnight curls at the edges.
Day crawls like a hangover along city roads,
behind mountains, trawls the dark mirror of landfill
and finds her reflection no longer ripples.
Wind has grown up and moved away,
packing every half-decent breeze and musty blow.
As if the last breath of night has stranded her high
on a cliff face. A forgotten guillemot jumpling
sits on a ledge. No-one left to encourage its leap.
Sally Spiers is retired and lives in North London. She has had poems published by the International Times, Artemesia, Brighton and Hove poetry competition, South Downs Poetry Competition and Wild Fire. She won first prize in the Charm Poetry competition 2024. She is an active member of the Peace movement and organises a London wide poetry study group.
Samuel A. Adeyemi
I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,
the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel
Mariah Whelan
St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...
Marissa Glover
What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a...
Cherry Doyle
/ on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain /
Jennie E. Owen
and in that last moment
the dead shrug, shake
off their boots, shuffle off
jackets and shirts,
Martin Figura for Mental Health Awareness Week
Children in care do not have much of a voice, they often accept whatever is given and do not dare to speak up.