Today’s choice
Previous poems
Chris Hardy
Memento Vivere
We lived here once.
The rain we heard
fell everywhere.
Silence except the wind
across the ground.
It’s best to keep quiet.
Words are like dead seeds,
they vanish when they’re said.
*
New Year’s Eve
without stars or moon.
I believe they are there
in their own light.
Faith goes deeper
than knowledge.
It is dawn for any soul awake
around the farthest star.
*
Sometimes if you can find it
life is worth the work.
The future’s always young,
we get younger by the minute.
Here and now goes quickly,
where is it?
Soon instead of moving away
the horizon will turn back
and pull the sky down like a lid.
Remember to live.
Chris Hardy has lived and travelled all over the world and is now in Sussex. His poems have won prizes and been widely published. His last collection, Key to the Highway, was published by Shoestring Press.
Sue Butler
Squirrels have beheaded all my parrot tulips
and the supermarket is out of chilli, also tabasco sauce.
Cormac Culkeen
the sun is a
white coin
lifted
from the sea
Maurice Devitt
Yes, you gave us your elegant hands
and capricious smile, but as I make my way
to the chiropodist this morning,
it’s your feet I’m thinking of . . .
Martin Ferguson
Pursue the facsimile
of the attendance sign;
here you must join the line.
Peter Branson
Emerge, from way beyond the pale, one day,
clenched feet an amulet about your wrist
Alice Huntley
carved from the tusk of my grandmother
I am learning how to remember
Bel Wallace
My dad is thinking geometrically,
eyes closed; he waves his arms
Sarah Crowe
they gave me the cold
cap to stop my chemo
hair falling out
Daniel Dean
A beastly man swallowing leeks. His throat
Is dirt, and yet his ghost could sit with Raphael