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.
Emma Simon
No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding
despite the unearthly hours, the half-light
mad sing-song routines of rocking a child
back to sleep.
Kushal Poddar
The furniture covered in once
transparent now foggy sheets
craft the room a morgue, and we
identity the bodies
Erich von Hungen
And the yellow moths
like some strange throw-away
tissues used up by nature
circle the lamp hanging above.
Helen Frances
I wasn’t in, so she left me a note.
Each word a tangle of broken ends, some oddly linked
to the next with a ghost trail of ink
from her rose-gold marbled fountain pen,
a rare indulgence she’d bought herself.
Suzanne Scarfone
truth be told
part of me has lived
in this box of disquiet
for years and years
let’s see
Julia Webb
Because a woman woke up
and her head had become a flower.
Freyr Thorvaldsson
A candle eats away at air
At the same rate that we do
Konstandinos (Dino) Mahoney
A teacher guides his pupils past headless marble torsos,
dusty cabinets of tiny Attic coins, pockmarked stylobates,
to a large clay pithos . . .
Maggie Brookes-Butt
For you, with your toddler bendiness,
the squat is a natural, easy position
while I hurt-strain, thinking of miners
crouched outside their front doors