Today’s choice

Previous poems

Seán Street

 
 
 
Creation Radio
 
There was a time when I took my radio
into the night wood and tuned its pyracantha
needle along the dial through noise jungles
to silent darkness at the waveband’s end.
First there was nothing, or at least my ears
couldn’t hear it, just the sea-shore non-stillness
of rushing static, but as the hours passed, that
phased out and in its place came something between
voices singing, a whispering, and the sound
of flowing like the sap inside me as my veins
streamed blood, pulsing, a low throb and beat behind
bark , and from deep under leaf mould and roots,
and all around, the slow breathing of sleeping
creatures,  the soft stillness of curled voles and birds.
It went on through the night, growing’s ‘live’ broadcast,
and then sang to itself beyond first light under
morning’s first songs in the stirring of branches,
but by then my small radio’s batteries
were too weak to pick it up, the daytime
stations too brutal and the sunshine too loud.
While it lasted though there was something in what
I heard that I was sure I knew but couldn’t
remember, something that had always been there,
although much fainter now, more distant.
In the darkness at the end of the dial
beyond babel, an ancient music seeded
from forest loam, and I understood then
and always after, that once the song stopped,
while it would be always unforgettable,
it would be forever unrecoverable.
 
 

Seán Street’s most recent collection is Running Out of Time (Shoestring Press, March 2024). Prose includes works on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Dymock Poets, and several studies of sound poetics, the latest being Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong, published in July 2023 by Bloomsbury Academic. He is emeritus professor at Bournemouth University and now lives in Liverpool.

 

Pascal Vine and – – – ajae – – – for our Invisible and Visible Disabilities Feature

Chronic fuck slug
Chronic floor sleeping
Chronic fist seething
Chronic food swallowing
Chronic feuding skin
Chronic foreseen surrender
Chronic failure synonym
Chronic sel(f)-inlictednes(s)
Chronic found inner-piece(s)
Chronic forcibly sending love (&) (kisse(s))
Chronic we (f)ucking mi(s)s you

– Pascal Vine

breaking through the battering lashings of exhaustion and overwhelm,
a quiet, passionate voice buds within you.
it exasperatingly sprouts and presses and pouts, saying:
“we’re forever dogged!
it’s forever dusk!
our soul’s been over-tillaged!
you’re becoming but a husk!
we need a rest
we need a break please!
our brittle bones are steeped in ache.”

– – – ajae – – –

Ellie Spirrett and Erin Coppin for our invisible and visible disabilities feature

This is the first time you have been out in three weeks.
Today sits like a joker between diamonds. Your punctured
skin sags over your bones, and you have dragged it
dangerously down the tarmac to mine this charity
shop for new parts.

– Ellie Spirrett

the riding of bikes
the rhythm of legs
the wind-driven tears
the wobbling turns
the handlebarred bags
the motion, the motion

-Erin Coppin

Jonathan Croose

The gravel drive seems longer now,
the knock feels like a split of skin
and out on the fen road, by now there are chalk marks,
diagrams and calculations, cones and contraflows,
plastic zips and silent spinning lights.
No more need for sirens there,
but here, here on the doorstep, every alarm must ring.

Gary Jude

The mandibles look like the tusks
of some gigantic bull elephant bagged
by hunters posing for a photograph
in pith helmets next to a tent
and a wind up phonograph.