Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jean Atkin
Lighting the Strangers into the cave
for Celia Fiennes, who rode 3000 miles around England on horseback in 1697
She hears the locals call it
the Devil’s Arse.
the hill on one End jutting out
in two parts and joyns in one at ye top
this Cleft between you Enter a great Cave
She creeps under the opening, then stands.
Her guide passes her the stub of a candle,
holds up his own to show the ceiling rock.
She hears the drip of water. In her riding skirt
that sweeps the ground, her narrow, heeled boots,
Celia clambers over stones and under stalactites
there is often Cause of Stooping very Low to pass by
and ye Rocks do drip water in many places
wch makes it damp and strikes Cold to you
haveing Lost ye sight of day
Although a Puritan, Celia writes it in her diary:
‘the Devil’s Arse’.
She is less prudish than the men
who come exploring
a generation later, resort
to asterisks.
Jean Atkin’s third full collection High Nowhere is was published last year by IDP. Previous publications include How Time is in Fields (IDP); The Bicycles of Ice and Salt (IDP) and Fan-peckled (Fair Acre Press). She is a poet in education and community. www.jeanatkin.com
Anne Symons
She was only a little woman
five feet nothing in nylon stockings.
‘If I stood sideways they’d mark me absent.’
Ben
When she said ‘could’, it was clearly in italics
and when she said ‘one day’, the creak of glaciers
shuddered around its edges.
Dragana Lazici
the days are long but the years are short.
seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back.
i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot.
Abigail Ottley
Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice-
cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to
look away
Maggie Mackay
The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a Grimm’s tale. Scarecrow hair, thinning. Unsmiling.
Natasha Gauthier
The tawny clutch appeared
on high-heeled evenings only,
slept in a nest of white tissue.
Romy Morreo
She only speaks to me these days
through groaning floorboards in the night
and slammed doors.
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