Today’s choice
Previous poems
Mark Smith
Divining
In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected
to water and power. A slow hour went by
of dirtied cards landing on the table.
I was less than a year out of school.
This is what work was going to be.
The foreman stamped in demanding to know
why no work was done. ‘No water. No cement,’
he was informed. The foreman stamped out
and through the perspex window we saw
him snap two thin branches from a dead tree.
‘Right, lazy bastards, after me!’
Boots shuffled on the cement-dust floor.
Roll-ups were folded into ashtrays.
The foreman held the branches.
I followed the men through the door.
The hunched back of his reflective jacket
turned to the east, to the south, to the east
again, until he tapped a current
strong enough to set the rods twitching.
The rods crossed and we all stood around,
until somebody lifted a shovel
and started to dig for the pipe that held
living water in the living ground.
Mark Ryan Smith lives in the Shetland Islands
Nathan Evans
If they ask where I am, tell them: I am
wintering. I have secreted small acorns
of sadness in crevices of gnarled limbs
and shall be savouring their bitternesses
on the back of my tongue until the days
lengthen.
Jim Ferguson
we can travel anywhere
she winks, but let’s rest here
in amongst these words
a moment can take a while
Gabrielle Meadows
I am tearing the peel from an orange gently and somewhere
Far away a tree falls in a forest and we
don’t hear it but the ground does and the birds do
Hongwei Bao
Every five minutes it does its job,
hoovers every inch of her memory,
declutters all pains and sorrows.
Gary Day
And once the father frowned
As the boy struggled to fasten
The drawbridge on his fort.
‘He’ll never be any good
With his hands’ he declared,
As if the boy wasn’t there.
Royal Rhodes
Perhaps the friends of Lazarus, who died
and slipped his shroud, on seeing him might swoon
or rush to hear the tales of that beyond
they hoped and feared to face.
Dmitry Blizniuk for World Poetry Day
God in his worn, greasy jeans like a car mechanic
is lighting a new life from an old one.
Jeff Skinner
It takes ages. Tell me what it is you’re after
she says, when finally I get through.
Annabelle Markwick-Staff
I devoured the Olympics, filled my mouth
and scrapbook with sticky ephemera.