Today’s choice
Previous poems
Col Fleetwood
Muckle Flugga
Unmoored on an ocean of heather
no wind to pluck the strings
of the aeolian harp
Policed by the unsettling glare
of nesting great skuas
we tread the narrow path
The boardwalk rises and falls
under a sky empty
and scoured of song
To the lighthouse
in search of the solan goose
we press on
Until all land ends
pearl-studded cliffs rear up
to arrest us
And the pitch of the sea
snares the unquiet silence
of our voices
Col Fleetwood lives and writes in the wild and beautiful borderlands between Scotland and England.
Susana Arrieta
Tempting death with every cobblestoned step
his face was a collection of broken records
Peter Leight
There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .
John Grey
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning