Today’s choice
Previous poems
Isabelle Thompson
‘Attention, after all is prayer’ (Jo Bell)
We saw a kingfisher threading the bright needle
of his body along the river. We saw a shag, stamping
her prehistoric shadow on the sky. We saw a hobby,
compact, fierce, not a sinew out of place, alert and spare,
watching us from his high vantage. All these were miracles,
but miraculous too was the stag beetle, thick and black,
gleaming against the white snowdrops; miraculous
and strange was the rat in the car park who sat
licking her tiny paws, her soft brown body touched
with beads of rain, her eyes dark as holes, hypnotic,
calling to us to watch her, note her unnoticed loveliness.
Isabelle Thompson is a graduate of Bath Spa University’s MA in Creative Writing, where she now works as a research assistant on programmes related to storytelling. Her debut pamphlet, Stalin’s Parrot, is published in May 2026 by Poetry Space.
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...
Marissa Glover
What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a...
Cherry Doyle
/ on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain /
Jennie E. Owen
and in that last moment
the dead shrug, shake
off their boots, shuffle off
jackets and shirts,