Today’s choice

Previous poems

Pippa Little

 

 

A woman is scrubbing a grave

A woman is scrubbing a grave
but the blood remains

a woman dreams of a brown beast
driven mad and knows it is herself

a woman believes the voice in her mind
nurses the splinter of glass in her heart

a woman may defend herself
and lay herself open in the same breath

a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning

 

 

 

Pippa Little‘s last collection Time Begins to Hurt came out from Arc in 2022. She’s working on her next book and teaching poetry for the Faber Academy in Newcastle.

Lesley Burt

Red-hot-pokers blazon her two world wars in flowerbeds, and in her hearth. The coalman drops odd nuggets under gaslight for neighbours to fetch in a bucket.

Philip Gross

This is the song of the cells’
soft throb, the quivering coherences,
their shuffling the profit and loss
of life, to have and to hold.