Today’s choice

Previous poems

Marjory Woodfield

 

 

Inventory of a Walk
 
On Kinley’s Lane, quince tree, wild blackberries, branches of feijoa reaching over a fence, fallen fruit. Into Abberley Park, past the bird bath with salamanders twisting round the base, down a gravel path. Hellebores, rhodos, magnolia stellata. Early morning walkers with their dogs. The couple who each day, scatter birdseed at the foot of an old oak. Where’s the butterfly tree? she asks and I point. Skyful of monarchs, dancing one minute, settling the next.

but see –
still
the morning shimmers

An asphalt path lined with yellow pollen. The tree trunk where my children once stood, sang I’m the king of the castle, you’re the dirty rascal, then jumped. On the northern lawn a dog barks at the foot of a holly tree. Rats, the owner tells me, and I look up, see them jumping from branch to branch. The council ought to do something, he says. Small stream, so low this morning, muddy-sided. A dog leaps in, sudden scatter of ducks, his bedraggled coat. I pull mine tightly, turn, walk away.

 

 

Marjory Woodfield is from New Zealand. She’s been widely published in journals including Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Spelt, Orbis… She won the New Zealand Robert Burns Poetry Prize, The New Zealand Society of Authors Heritage Poetry Prize, and was second in the inaugural Patricia Eschen Prize for Poetry.

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.

Oz Hardwick

The ghost of my mother knows the names of everything, but
she can’t tell me, because ghosts, whatever you have heard
to the contrary, can’t speak.

Warren Mortimer

& you’ll understand if i leave open this theatre of air
not as the invite for another loss
but to honour their world unwilling to collapse

Jena Woodhouse

Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.