Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sue Norton
Summer’s End
Today I tipped the packet of coffee
into the cafetiere instead of the tin.
Caught myself in time, didn’t pour water in.
I’ve started to write notes to myself:
Shut bathroom window. Lock back door.
Yesterday at the bank I couldn’t remember
mini statement but I can recognise
this orange blur, this hover of wings
above abelia grandiflora, a hummingbird
hawk moth exploring the tube-flowers
with its long tongue. I sip my coffee.
Old age comes tapping up my garden path
on unsteady feet, but I’m content to watch
a flycatcher flitting up and back, up
and back to its perch on the fence post,
the hawk moth probing
trumpet by trumpet as it siphons
nectar’s last drops,
the flycatcher fluttering up to snatch
one more feed at summer’s end,
preparing for migration.
Sue Norton has had poems published in various magazines and anthologies.
Paula R. Hilton
When the genie appears, I’m in a frivolous
mood. First request? My mom’s apple pie.
Alice Huntley
slack in a bag from the freezer aisle
shaken out like shrunken grey memes
I long for the podding of beans
Rhonda Melanson
The magic of growing things, its tangible beauty, I did not understand.
Clive Donovan
I go to the top of the risen hill,
above the trees, beyond the grass,
where only hard ground lives
Gary Akroyde
We searched for it
through the tarmac in every rain-bruised sky
in dark Pennine shadows where great mills
spewed out ringlets of ghost-grey fog
Nathan Curnow
I like to think it’s a story about himself and Einstein
floating in zero gravity, Albert sailing through the capsule
toward his drifting pipe, Brian playing We Will Rock You—
Paul Short
Sleep.
Elusive as lucid dreams.
Closed eyes teem wotsit-orange,
spiderweb scarlet &
thatch-brown
Ash Bowden
Out again with the pitchfork churning
compost into the old green bin, stinking
and silent as an ancient earthen vat.
Mallika Bhaumik
This is not a frilly, mushy love letter
to a city whose allure lies in defying all labels and holding the mystery key to a man’s heart, though none has ever been able to lay an absolute claim on it,