Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sheila Saunders
Man in a Room
after Interior at Paddington – Lucian Freud.
Which is the subject?
Limp-leaved yucca
reluctantly dying,
the foreground figure
in its stony pot?
Or the man with a stare
glassy-eyed behind spectacles,
fixed into absence
or challenging the viewer.
He inhabits, but barely, the slovenly mackintosh,
a cigarette hardly held, unlit,
the only suggestion of purpose
his curled fist of yellow fingers.
Can this be a home, sordid,
uncared for, or just a waiting room
where he stands in a purgatorial present?
In fear perhaps of the loiterer under a gas lamp,
boy or man undefined,
seeming absorbed into the street wall,
looking up to the window grille-
– this no protection from the imagined
or real.
Sheila Saunders graduated from St Anne’s College, Oxford, with a degree in English Language and Literature, and since then worked as a reporter on local weekly and daily newspapers in Lancashire, Lincolnshire and Buckinghamshire. She has always loved theatre, music and art, but it is her observation and fascination with her natural surroundings, including the wildlife of the coast, that has inspired most of her poetry. Her poems have been published in journals including As It Ought to Be and Words for the Wild.
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.
William Collins
We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.