Today’s choice
Previous poems
Trelawney
What is holding you back from building your wormery?
You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
And no lack of wood – an affluence of pallet offcuts. Here –
the frames are half-made! Is it the fear of getting it wrong?
Of irreversible mistakes now drilled in. The commitment
to a design that might not ultimately lead to compost.
Is it the threat of foxes – always the foxes – that you might
aid their survival? Or the lack of a lid to keep it all in?
Is it the prospect of no longer having a wormery to build?
Of being someone who is no longer building a wormery.
Someone done with DIY. Done with improvements. With no purpose left.
Of being someone who even builds a wormery.
But you will keep it, as an unfinished testimony. A celebration
of indecision. And one day decomposed small print might
mingle with castoffs, for the worms to make sense of it all.
Trelawney has featured in the Bridport and Winchester Poetry Prizes and Munster Literature Centre’s International Chapbook Competition; and has work published in the Broken Sleep anthologies of modern Cornish poets and on masculinity, Magma, Southword, and elsewhere. Iinsta.BenTrelawney
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
David Thompson
Scrolling through my inbox I hold down
the shift key, select all and mass delete
briefly feel the repose of the therapist’s couch.
Marcelle Newbold
Hope lies like the edge of a teaspoon, upward facing, a thickness
perhaps enough solidness to knife
through a banana or other soft fruit