Today’s choice
Previous poems
Margaret Baldock
Hurst Reservoir
In the sharpness of a January wind
we stepped down,
feeling with neoprened feet
for the safety of the edge.
Bags and clothes huddled
on a plastic picnic sheet.
We launched, lovingly
into dark and silky water
unknown yet benign.
Bodies at awkward angles.
Heads raised high against
the tiny vicious waves.
Crazy women some might say
but we laughed
with the joy of it, almost cried,
elation our reward for saying:
No! to fear of cold.
No! to fear at all.
Margaret Baldock is a retired NHS project manager whose poetry aims to express spirituality in the concrete everydayness of life. She lives in Derbyshire and practices as a spiritual director.
Gordan Struić
Still —
I kept
writing.
Sometimes
just:
“Hi.”
Margaret Poynor-Clark
Inside my bedroom I take a fresh blade
pull off my jumper, examine the ladder
in front of the mirror cut through my laces
rung by rung
Jenny Hockey
That’s when she went to ground,
after she disobeyed, painted her plastic tea set
red, hidden away in the playhouse they built
down where bindweed draped
Sue Proffitt
You and I have had many talks since you died.
Nick Cooke
If when you go to the barber today
He asks if you’d like him to ‘tidy up your ears’,
Think of all the wildest sprawling vegetation
That will never be tidied, or trimmed, by clippers or shears,
Edward Alport
High up, out of reach,
on a branch, no, more a twig,
a little wizened, shrunken face leers down.
Colin Pink
not the kind you eat with
but useful to turn the soil
root out potatoes or carrots
Linda Ford
My Father Bought a Signal Box
dismantled it piece by piece
then sold the wood, as a job lot.
Ryan O’Neill
we hug and i act cool
as the american fridge ice
shattering on kitchen tiles