Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rebecca Wheatley
Muscle memory
He thought his heart was broken yet the day began again.
He couldn’t marvel in the shine of sunsets rising and falling
and yet he rose and fell in turn.
His hands resigned themselves to tea making
and his legs carried him much the same.
He bundled her belongings into bin liners
and his heart told him it was not her in those bags,
reminded him of her wisdom and her nonsense,
showed her soft face enveloped in the folds of drawn curtains.
His heart hammered so relentlessly he struggled to hold on to it.
Caught unawares by her handwriting on a scribbled note,
her smile in a photo he hadn’t seen,
a grieving friend he couldn’t remember.
Swelling and contracting it sounded the rhythm of his day,
asking so much of him that he sometimes had to lay down and hide.
Not broken, conjuring love from the loss with every last muscle.
His heart had never worked so hard or been more alive.
Rebecca Wheatley is poet, actress and singer in Brighton. She tours her own one woman shows with music and has poems published in The tide rises , Dreitch, Bindweed, Porridge, The New Ulster’ ,Southlight. Galway Review and Salzburg Journal.
Stephen Keeler
The days were huge and kind
and sometimes after school
we’d buy a bag of broken biscuits
for the long walk home
across the heavy heat of afternoon
on lucky days she wouldn’t take
the pennies offered up in supplication
Joseph Blythe
I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..
Denise Bundred
Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.
Rahma O. Jimoh
A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.
Samuel A. Adeyemi
I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,
the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel
Mariah Whelan
St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...