Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tamara Evans
Return
Travel West. Submerge yourself
in the M4’s homeward drift.
Remember how
its nightly glow
bewitched the kid
at your bedroom window?
It looked like fire, didn’t it?
Exit at junction 34.
Drop into street view
Follow the lane
down past prickly fields
where swallows zip.
Remember those kids
pulling petals
from clover heads?
Sucking sugar
from each wet tip?
Close your bedroom door.
Listen for tawny owls
and the InterCity.
Watch pipistrelles twist
in the velvet night
like you used to.
As they always did.
You remember, don’t you?
You remember everything.
Tamara Evans’s poems have been published in Poetry Wales and in the Write Out Loud Milestones anthology, and selected to appear on buses in London and Brighton in Poetry on the Buses competitions. Find Tamara on bluesky, instagram.
Matt Gilbert
Alive, but not exactly,
as it fills the frame, flicker-lit
by lightning. . .
Rebecca Gethin
This morning
the room is bright with snowlight
and everything seems illuminated differently.
Lorraine Carey
Every Sunday he insists on beef
from Boggs’s butchers, a forty minute drive
away.
Gabriel Moreno
It’s hard to say what he did, my father.
His shoulders portaged crates,
he captained boats in the night,
chocolate eggs would appear
which smelt of ChefChaouen.
Henry Wilkinson
I rolled an orange across daybreak;
I waited for the moon to ripen.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, we bring you KB Ballentine, J.S. Watts and Terry Dyson
as wind whispers your name.
Summer’s breaking down and a starker calling comes –
leaves saturated with sunset before surrendering.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, we bring you Helen Laycock, Ruth Aylett and Debbie Strange
we will meet again
on the other side
On the tenth day of Christmas, we bring you Jenny McRobert, Angela Topping and Maria C. McCarthy
The tree makes its way into the garden
looms at the window, a disconsolate ghost
On the ninth day of Christmas, we bring you Caroline Smith, Bec Mackenzie and David Keyworth
After the lunch he gets his folder
of Christmas games.