Today’s choice
Previous poems
Helen Finney
The Perseids at Bannau Brycheiniog
At my feet the window sprawls a view of kneaded land,
craggy baked by the hand of the gods, dusted green
with short bit grass. A sheep walks by
along the grey faded road, pitted with age,
worn tired with wear.
Last night I’d lain upon the ground late after dark, the warmth
of the day held beneath me, to await the heaven’s shower.
While all slept but the owl that called, the tears of St Lawrence
wept in the sky, lines of silver silked the black blue,
tacking space to the earth, sewing us into the universe.
With an MA in Fine Art, Helen Finney spent most of her life working as a fine artist in Swansea; however, recently her practice has taken her more towards writing. She has been published in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Poetry Wales, Dreich Mag, Gyroscope Review and elsewhere. She has released four collections of poetry.
Stephen Keeler
The days were huge and kind
and sometimes after school
we’d buy a bag of broken biscuits
for the long walk home
across the heavy heat of afternoon
on lucky days she wouldn’t take
the pennies offered up in supplication
Joseph Blythe
I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..
Denise Bundred
Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.
Rahma O. Jimoh
A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.
Samuel A. Adeyemi
I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,
the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel
Mariah Whelan
St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...