Today’s choice
Previous poems
Margaret Baldock
Hurst Reservoir
In the sharpness of a January wind
we stepped down,
feeling with neoprened feet
for the safety of the edge.
Bags and clothes huddled
on a plastic picnic sheet.
We launched, lovingly
into dark and silky water
unknown yet benign.
Bodies at awkward angles.
Heads raised high against
the tiny vicious waves.
Crazy women some might say
but we laughed
with the joy of it, almost cried,
elation our reward for saying:
No! to fear of cold.
No! to fear at all.
Margaret Baldock is a retired NHS project manager whose poetry aims to express spirituality in the concrete everydayness of life. She lives in Derbyshire and practices as a spiritual director.
John Grey
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.
Patrick Wright
It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.