Today’s choice
Previous poems
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri
Glory of the Blacker Berry
Today. Let us forget the blunt-edged sorrows.
Remember the black joys, my darker brother—
the high laughter of women, the bright, unbothered
stride of boys. We have died more times than the days
have names, yet here is the breath. The living.
Don’t you want it all? To inhabit the skin to the fullest?
The chain days have passed, and the cotton days,
the caged days, the muted-color days. Let them go.
What matters now is the feast of this survival.
The glory of our own light, black light.
Look at us: the deeper the root, the sweeter the juice.
Glory of the blacker berry, split wide open to the sun.
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri is a Ghanaian poet whose work has appeared/forthcoming in Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review and North American Review. Winner of the 2025 African Writers Award and runner-up for the 2026 Cambridge Poetry Prize. Instagram @poetraniel
Claire Booker
Never has there been so much interest
in the humble tongue. It peek-a-boos from my mouth
like the little man in a weather clock.
Jacob Mckibbin
my brother saw his attacker
at a petrol station
Janet Hatherley
He’s ten years older than he’d said, which makes him
twenty-eight years older, not eighteen.
Syed Anas S
We are the ones
who see big crackers
burst every day—
Dharmavadana
She barely glances at you when you chink
your spare coins in her upturned cap, but still
spreads a spell among the pavement footfalls,
Tim Dwyer
Shedding Annamakerrig It begins high up the chestnut tree with leaves on the twigs on the tips of branches where sap has slowed. Turning amber carried by the breeze they touch the earth, rest on the grass where autumn begins Tim...
Gopal Lahiri
From this far-side apartment
you watch jarul leaves darkening with the seasons
Adam Kelly
Determined, you smash against the window
I have to admire you in your striped suit
Sandra Noel
The sea happens to me today
not because I’m the woman in the bakers
brusque turned rude
or the peaches still hard in the bowl