Today’s choice
Previous poems
Iris Anne Lewis
A moonless night when lanterns are shuttered
The track leads through thickets, threaded with eyes.
Elusive scraps of dreams, they gleam, flicker out.
Long dead stars pierce the canopy
with pinpricks of white, cold and exact.
I stumble through woods, the path
thick with leafmould, my footsteps muffled.
Something unseen scuttles in the undergrowth.
A harsh bark, owls’ wings brush the air.
Night retreats, dawn flushes the sky. The sun
splashes through trees, braids dark with light.
Leaves cast dancing shade on the path. I walk on,
the woods lit green and singing.
Iris Anne Lewis is widely published. Featured in Black Bough Poetry and Poetry Wales she has won or been placed in many competitions. Her first collection Amber is available from Amazon or contact her on @irisannelewis.bskysocial or X @irisannelewis.
George Sandifer-Smith
Spring 1833 – mists folding their sheets in the fields.
Isaac Roberts feels the turned earth, his father’s
farm an island in the hurtling Milky Way –
Sharon Phillips
Wet tarmac blinks red and gold,
names shine outside the Gaumont.
‘Stop dreaming, you’ll get lost.’
Bill Greenwell
Before the first turn of the key, before
adjusting the mirror, before releasing the handbrake even,
Dad said: there are two things you need to know.
Matt Gilbert
Alive, but not exactly,
as it fills the frame, flicker-lit
by lightning. . .
Rebecca Gethin
This morning
the room is bright with snowlight
and everything seems illuminated differently.
Lorraine Carey
Every Sunday he insists on beef
from Boggs’s butchers, a forty minute drive
away.
Gabriel Moreno
It’s hard to say what he did, my father.
His shoulders portaged crates,
he captained boats in the night,
chocolate eggs would appear
which smelt of ChefChaouen.
Henry Wilkinson
I rolled an orange across daybreak;
I waited for the moon to ripen.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, we bring you KB Ballentine, J.S. Watts and Terry Dyson
as wind whispers your name.
Summer’s breaking down and a starker calling comes –
leaves saturated with sunset before surrendering.