Today’s choice
Previous poems
Roger Robinson
Pipeline
We walk from cane fields,
cotton in our nightshirts, sweet
sugar on our teeth.
My peoples chant strong magic.
My peoples beatbox in jail.
Roger Robinson won the T.S. Eliot Prize (2019), the RSL Ondaatje Prize (2020), the Cholmondeley Award (2024). He is a Royal Society of Literature Fellow and has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, and the European Prize for Freedom.
His collection A Portable Paradise was named a New Statesman Book of the Year. His book Home Is Not a Place, created in collaboration with Johny Pitts, was a Guardian Poetry Book of the Year and shortlisted for the British Book Awards. Insta: @rogerrobinsononline Website: rogerrobinsononline.com
Rachael Hill
Those times my tongue becomes a lemon
filling my mouth with bitter pith
John Doyle
I hide a knife amongst a bush longing to burn,
days like these are plots from a heathen’s bible.
William Coniston
My second cousin twice removed arrived in May
at her old nest in the eaves of the ruined barn.
Simon Williams
A white cloak that folds like a shopping bag,
like a Pac-a-mac with pagan overtones,
much larger when unfolded than a pocket,
a TARDIS of a cloak.
Emma Page
I grow shoots, acid green;
climb the walls,
surprise myself.
Mary McQueen
It’s starts in utero, painted wood carvings thick as a
finger, gift
wrapped in nostalgia.
Alan Hardy
Made a list.
A record.
The dishes she ate.
Monuments visited.
In Paris.
Susana Arrieta
Tempting death with every cobblestoned step
his face was a collection of broken records
Peter Leight
There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .