Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gráinne Daly
Not for me Glasnevin
Nor its Irish revolutionaries.
Not for me the slate rain
on my headstone
for ten months of the year
and intermittent showers in the other two.
Not for me the tomb of Irish soil.
Put me on a plane
and let me make one last journey
before my final departure.
Secure me in a marble wall
at the foot of a mountain
where sodden soil can’t stiffen my bones
and the ice of a Dublin breeze
can’t make them creek.
Settle me in Casalattico
where the sun will surely warm me
and the snow will leave a
greener valley in its midst.
Fresh flowers will be left by my tomb.
Bury me in Italy
though I was not born there
she is in my blood
and I belong in the womb of her earth.
Gráinne Daly’s work was longlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Short Story of the Year Award. She won the UCD Maeve Binchy Travel Award and her writing has appeared in The Under Review, Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature, Southword Journal, The Honest Ulsterman, The Ogham Stone, Splonk and many other publications
Soledad Santana
Seen as she’d hung her cranial lantern
from the roof of her step-father’s garden shed,
the parabolic formula was skipped; like two calves, we followed the fence
to the end of the foot-ball pitch.
Claire Harnett-Mann
Behind the block, the night tears in scrub-calls.
Fox kill scores the morning,
ripped by prints in muck.
Hedy Hume
Stepping into the opposing seat
I smile, and the look I receive
Makes me feel the antisocial one.
Matthew F. Amati
Hands said to Head
look what you’ve made me do
it’s not me, Head said, talk to
Heart, that guy’s sick
Mariam Saidan
‘Female singing constitutes a ‘forbidden act’ (ḥarām),
punishable under Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code.’
Meg Pokrass
This is what happens when she sits alone in her dining room, eating smoked trout and canned sardines.
Chen-ou Liu
this fresh morning
so much like the others …
yet starlings shape-shift
Jim Paterson
A Tuesday morning in November
out on the street taking in the bins.
As a flight of crows flashed past
the street lights went out.
Andy Humphrey
Noises are louder now: the kesh
of tyres on tarmac slicked
with leaves. Rain’s drumming thunder.