Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jake Roberts
onwards
hamlet asked it to the dark night sea
where do waters end and i begin where the
moonlight shimmers on a cragged rock
to which i tie my errant being
hard against the night
solid against the wind
it still erodes but just more slowly
it cries for help but just more softly
love’s song it sings but just more sad
we couldn’t make it last
except as reverie
hamlet asked it to the voiceless sea
must i be thrust biannually
into water’s salty anti-memory
to be nothing but the fish who takes a timid bite
from the waves’ sick surface surging rolling
hard against the rock
solid against its grain
the washed-up dolt with shrunken cock
sandy naked by the wet brown groyne
is i
the winter sun
and the creaking windows of a seaside town
who sing towards the english sea
o blue i crack and break and leak
i don’t know what i want to be
Jake Roberts is a poet, critic and teacher based in London. Instagram: @jakegrxz
Patrick Deeley
As you rummage of a morning
among dust-furred personal effects
jumbled in an old
wooden suitcase under a bed . . .
Terry Jones
The Lake District Tourist Board
has had no input into what
you are now reading, but I so
miss Cumbria in Holy Week
Mary Mulholland
Who will pick the apples now she’s gone?
Samantha Carr
She has few secrets with her translucent map skin of blue underground rivers visible to scale.
Alison Patrick
A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters . . .
Julie Egdell
At the shore of impossibility
last moments come to nothing
all our plans die in the salt air
of another new day on the black sea.
Elena Chamberlain
My trans friends and I just want to go swimming
in cold water
without a thousand eyes watching.
Regina Weinert
It was the snatch of a dream,
someone said this is not
what you do in the desert,
it was one precise thing, not a list . . .
Philip Dunkerley
We leave early, drive for two and a half hours,
park, find the church where you were married.