Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jessica Mookherjee for International Women’s Day
Herb of the Sun
The pain comes plucked from a field
in garlands of sunlight.
So many women weave aches into strings
of marigolds, with bent backs from children,
livelihoods of pouring orange petals, scents
of sweet incense and the sunlight is strung
up on trains from Silguri hills to all
the holy places in those northern mountains.
My aunt sends me a picture of marigolds,
to remember my blessing. We’re both aging
and far flung. I’m a sticky-neck garish
thing, she says always the bright flower,
cheerful blossom, a fiery little immigrant.
Jessica Mookherjee is a British poet of Bengali heritage and grew up in Wales and London, now lives in Kent. She has been published in many print and online journals and anthologies and was twice highly commended for best single poem in the Forward Prize 2017 and 2021. Author of three full collections, her second collection Tigress (Nine Arches Press) was shortlisted for the Ledbury Munthe Prize in 2021. Her most recent books are Notes from a Shipwreck (Nine Arches Press 2022) and Desire Lines (Broken Sleep Books 2023). Jessica also works full time as a Consultant in Public Health.
Catherine O’Brien
When all is quiet save for the silky rustling of an autumn breeze
let that love show.
When your patience is darkness-dappled and as weary as an exhausted scholar
let that love show.
Marianne Habeshaw
session in the woods. Someone took a feather
to the hairdressers. Gum cross-sectioned
my cheek; he forgot about removal to kiss.
Had to avoid tree roots, placed us on green.
He mentioned his bullied niece kept reaching
for her blanket; Mr. Smith is quaking regression,
Fergal O’Dwyer
but sunlight streaming in
through impractically curtainless windows;
my skin, made-up in golden light,
looking taught from affluence
and vitamins.
Like they do in films,
Hattie Graham
wait for the witch who comes to pick wild garlic.
Together we can be brave and
pull the green bits from her teeth.
Wandering the glen with
nothing in our pockets, we can search
for the place where fairies still live.
No one will find us there,
not even the old grey bell they ring at tea time.
George Parker
I make broth, feel odd wiping it off your face
moments after swiping through bodies, preferences,
dates. Sunset-orange forget-me-nots mar the napkin cloth
Nicolas Spicer
Paysage Moralisé
There’s more to this three-foot square:
lilac vetch & vermilion
field-poppies, some sort of crucifer . . .
Luke Bateman
Brown limpets with tonsured heads
creeping over the fish-stink isle,
spongy underfoot, seaweed for grass.
Adam Horovitz
Such stillness in the air. The attic window
is a cupped ear set to alert the house to subtle
shifts in atmosphere: auguries; signs; any tiny
notice of cataclysmic change. . .
Jenny Mitchell
What Part of Me? Sun demands a front row seat above the graveyard through the trees when my mother’s placed in soil, surrounded by her friends’ small talk – She must have sent the rays for us. Women in their Sunday best, men in greying suits...