Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sarah Nathan
There’s The Big Things
The ash that screams into the night,
the lake that dries, the child amongst the rubble,
the heat, the fire, the lack of books,
the men who’ve clearly lost their minds.
And then there’s the small. The glass that smashes
on the floor, a relic glazed in blue.
The seedlings devoured in their pots,
the text that rattles round a broken phone,
the children needing less and less,
a sense of being all alone. A backwards glance,
a hurried kiss, left on edge in sweat and fear,
not knowing how to survive at all.
In the night the stomach swells,
and water churns around. A tiny foot
imprints skin, from the inside out.
I’m woken by birds at dawn to this
back-to-front and broken dream
and now you pull away,
umbilicus strained,
a leaf that falls,
a different season yet again.
Sarah Nathan is a teacher and writer from East Lothian, Scotland. She has poems featured in The Dark Horse, Outcrop Poetry, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and forthcoming in The Poetry Lighthouse and from the roots (Glasgow University’s creative writing anthology). When not in the classroom she can mostly be found at the beach.
Finola Scott
Such a knife, a real Et Tu Brute number. Bone handled, incisive. Decades of marriage
had whetted the blade to feather lean. Anniversaries marked in metal.
Sarah James/Leavesley
My mother’s knife made the first cuts –
she removed my fertile light bulbs,
then stuffed my womb with shredded tissues.
Max Wallis
god grant us the serenity / to accept the things we cannot change / the courage to change the / things we can / and the wisdom to know el differencio /
Play, National Poetry Day: Heather Hughes, Laura Webb, Jude Brigley
We searched so long for that clover.
Every time the sun shone we scoured
the fields and woods, running past
the children playing with skipping ropes
Play, For National Poetry Day: Suzanna Fitzpatrick, Charlotte Dormandy, Lee Fraser
10 Children dart in the dark, screamers
streaming sweets and neon, their parents
Play, for National Poetry Day: MD Bier, Catherine Sweeney, Rachel Burns
Those hot hot summer days. Hair curling against sticky clammy foreheads.
Pony tails, pig tails or braids. Keep it off our neck and backs.
Play, for National Poetry Day: Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana, Ruth Aylett , Brian Comber
They can imagine a forest,
we don’t need this minimalist tree,
we’ll represent a place to live without walls, without foundations or a hearth.
Play, for National Poetry Day: Jennifer A. McGowan, Judith Shaw, Robin Houghton, Wendy Klein
Over and over, you are Dorothy
or Glenda the Good,
me the Wicked Witch of the West
Play, for National Poetry Day: Oenone Thomas, Seán Street, David A. Lee
Every evening at the care home, I pull in
two armchairs til they’re facing. Opposites,
we never fist bump, high-five or
touch each other’s vying outstretched fingers.