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.
Mark Wyatt
Daedalus
Plato loved his incessant questioning
of the natural world’s engineering
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
I tempt you with morsels
of soft-skinned peach, a pear sliced
in quarters, pipless and skinless.
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.
From the Archives: Dipo Baruwa-Etti
Seats
Before a table of white
People, I stand with ballet
Slippers strapped/soft soles
Head pointed towards the angels…
Ian Harker
The first night you lay down your head in London
there is hawthorne between your sheets.
Julian Bishop
He emerges at nightfall, lights a solitary votive candle//
prostrates himself at her scuffed toes.
Jon Miller
Haul down the ladder and you’re in
under a skylight casting a blue dream.
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.
Jenny Hope
No man can hold me.
See –
I blur the line between days . . .