Today’s choice
Previous poems
Denise Bundred
Starry Night Over the Rhône
Vincent van Gogh. Oil on canvas, Arles 1888.
A quay on the riverbank.
Lovers dissolve in a sheen
of violet and mauve — enveloped
by a forget-me-not cold glow.
The man’s harsh words are crests and troughs
of Prussian blue across the Rhône.
Hers are shrill — brazen lamplight descends
to russet-bronze, burns on troubled water.
Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.
Above the brutal gold of gas-flame —
an ultramarine arc of sky flaunts
a swing of constellations —
emerald, ruby, sapphire
opal and polished lapis lazuli.
This night ‘more richly coloured than the day’
holds some remote hope
in the dazzle of a field of stars.
Denise Bundred has an MA in Writing and won the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in 2016. She has poems in various anthologies & magazines. Litany of a Cardiologist was published in 2020.
wordpress.com/denise-bundred
Sue Finch
The moon is a Punch in the sky.
A boy is carrying a bruise.
And nobody is talking to either of them
about ordinary things.
Heather Holcroft-Pinn
These things I know,
and in knowing, can do . . .
Ruth Higgins
You wrestle the car seat’s five-point harness,
scrabble for a foothold in the new life.
Olive M Ritch
We Need to Talk about Shoes
The right shoes
for work, party, funeral.
Kathryn Anna Marshall
Grandad keeps pigeons and canaries
in the same cage. He has never hurt me. He probably could . . .
Cindy Botha
That way a river crimps eddies in its skin
is this matter of my unreliable breath.
Colin McGuire
You’d come in the front door
and whistle, I’d be upstairs
and whistle back
Gerry Stewart
In My Last Phone Call Did I say it looks like rain? I meant the sky is black with a thirst only crying can quench, clouds smothering the hills. Did I say this was my home? It was a mistake. The walls are collapsing even as I paint myself into a...
S Reeson
There is no evidence anywhere that Albert Einstein ever said the definition of insanity is ‘is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’ except there he is, all over the Internet, being attributed with having done exactly that.