Today’s choice

Previous poems

Jean O’Brien

 

 

 

Spring is in the Air

Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted,
birds peck with blunted beaks,
pushing up are the blind green pods
of what will soon be yellow daffodils,
given light and air.

I wait to hear news about you,
hear that you resurfaced,
struggled up throught the ether,
your broken ribs tied tight
with titanium wire

holding your heart in place.
Your spread chest stapled together
skin taut like delicate tissue
and pocked with steel.
I am afraid with spring unfolding

you will ripen and split apart
your heart bursting with daffodils.

 

 

Jean O’Brien is an award winning poet whose latest collection Stars Burn Regardless was published by Salmon Poetry (Irl) in 2022. She was most recently shortlisted in this year’s Bridport Prize. She currently tutors in poetry/creative writing.  www.jeanobrienpoet.ie 

Maggie Mackay

Daddy’s girl, always. Tea done, you fetch Glen’s lead and we climb the hill to the spread of The Links. We talk. It’s as if we have met in a previous life, the click – you, a pipe smoking fan of Bertrand Russell, always think, think, and think the eternal puzzles of existence. Our walks are adventures in language, in invention, a form of The Great Egg Race without eggs.

Mike Wilson

My reptilian brain calculates the minimum I’ll do to escape
the weight of obligation …

but before I finish the math, we regress into college kids
rushing the street Julia barricades with furniture
to keep out the law by breaking the law.

Emily Veal

      boudicca you’re a brewery down the road i drank a bottle of your finest on the train back from bury st edmunds the red queen (no one will call you ginger) i see you everywhere realised you were also the wetherspoons round the corner the one with...

Lesley Burt

tongue it various      from burr to babel      swish to swirl
rushes between buttresses      plaits threads of currents
where swans lord-and-lady-it along the centre
trips over own flow      with
fish-out-of-water flash      salmon’s silver high-jump

Sam Szanto

This love was. Slowly it becomes formless,
drifting, softening, snakeskin-empty,
the part it has played in who I am now
secreted in a pocket of a coat

Bel  Wallace

      Trespasses Forgive me The E flat on your baby grand (not quite in tune). This same finger in the crack that goes clean through the bungalow’s supporting wall. Then flicking dust from the fringed edge of your floral lampshade. Noticing that they...