Today’s choice

Previous poems

Jim Murdoch

 

 

 

Minder

Care is a state in which something does matter – Rollo May

I didn’t know what to do with all my dad’s love
so, I minded it for him fully intending to give it back one day.
Thing is, that day never arrived, the time never seemed right
and things always got in the way but the love kept on showing up.
Instead, I started to think in terms of some kind of grand gesture
but every time I looked at those boxfuls of love it seemed
such an impossible thing to pull together.

He will pass before me, decades before—
barring accident, assault, ailment and act of God—
and I’ll have to do something with all the boxes then,
I don’t know, maybe rent a storage unit or something,
because certain things charity shops simply refuse to take,
like underwear or dentures and other people’s love.
I mean, I could just bin it all but that feels wrong.

Like tearing up old photos.

 

 

Jim Murdoch: Scot, gatophile, honorary woman, classical music aficionado, novelist and producer of half-to-three-quarter-(and-occasionally-actually-fully)-decent poems for over half a century.

Kirsty Fox

Winged     Kirsty Fox is a writer and artist specialising in ecopoetics. She writes lyric essays and poetry, and has had work published by Apricot Press, Arachne Press, and Streetcake Magazine. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently studying...

Jason Ryberg

Sometimes I’d swear that
the ancient box fan I’ve hauled
     around with me for
     years is a receiver for
     the conversations of ghosts

Peter Wallis

Dead in a chest,
 are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.

Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
   always Third week in August

Amanda Bell

We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims

A W Earl

Doors

My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors,

where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk 

or clutter to rest themselves upon.