Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jim Paterson
One For The Crow
A Tuesday morning in November
out on the street taking in the bins.
As a flight of crows flashed past
the street lights went out.
My neighbour, very good at counting,
said it was a coincidence,
but it looked as if the crows
put the lights out.
I asked him to put a figure
on how sure he was of that.
Jim Paterson worked in the Scottish Highlands for many years, now living in Perpignan, France. Recent work in City of Poets, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Poetry Bus, Antae Journal. Two pamphlets, Grit 1 and 2, upcoming book, RSVP, with Michel Borla. https://jwdpaterson.wordpress.
Rose Ramsden
We left the play early. It was the last day before the start of secondary school. Dad told me off for slapping the seats
Seán Street
There was a time when I took my radio
into the night wood and tuned its pyracantha
needle along the dial through noise jungles
to silent darkness at the waveband’s end.
J.S. Dorothy
Find yourself by the lake,
its icy membrane split by the long
arrow of a skein, reflected
flurry of wings, cries
bawling.
Sarah Rowland Jones
The terns lift as one
from the salt-pools behind the beach
– a thick undulating line
Jean O’Brien
Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted,
birds peck with blunted beaks,
pushing up are the blind green pods
of what will soon be yellow daffodils,
given light and air.
Jean Atkin
We scoured the parish tip most weeks, when we were kids.
We clambered it in wellies. Ferals, we scavenged
in the debris of the adults’ lives.
Sally Festing
Life lines still arc round the base of each thumb
though the bulk of hand’s muscle mass
Joe Crocker
There was always, of course, the cold
– its freezing pretty fingerprints on our side of the pane.
Julie Sheridan
They married in a chapel of black steel
bars, tethered up their feathers to serve as
stained glass. . .