Today’s choice
Previous poems
Roger Robinson
Pipeline
We walk from cane fields,
cotton in our nightshirts, sweet
sugar on our teeth.
My peoples chant strong magic.
My peoples beatbox in jail.
Roger Robinson won the T.S. Eliot Prize (2019), the RSL Ondaatje Prize (2020), the Cholmondeley Award (2024). He is a Royal Society of Literature Fellow and has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, and the European Prize for Freedom.
His collection A Portable Paradise was named a New Statesman Book of the Year. His book Home Is Not a Place, created in collaboration with Johny Pitts, was a Guardian Poetry Book of the Year and shortlisted for the British Book Awards. Insta: @rogerrobinsononline Website: rogerrobinsononline.com
Margaret Baldock
We launched, lovingly
into dark and silky water
unknown yet benign.
Krishh Biswal
You did not ask for knees —
They found the floor themselves.
Not from command,
But gravity.
Tamara Salih
That winter the snow kept rising,
a slow white wall climbing the windows,
each morning untouched,
Alicia Byrne Keane
I’ve been reading about ghost apples.
They are a real phenomenon, like how
everyone we can see on the wide street
outside this building is still living,
Gareth Culshaw
I tried to work from a van. Sitting in the passenger
seat listening to a guy whistle. His frown, a cloud
he lost when his mother died. Each wrinkle
Jennie Howitt
Those full udders will slowly burst
spitting milk onto the grass strands.
Matt Bryden
at the cider farm, eight minutes
before handover, we strike on
feeding the donkeys –
Colin Pink
to embrace you is like clasping
a fist full of briars
Simon Williams
What were these fairies called
before we knew of hummingbirds?
Bumblebee moth because of the size?
Reed-nose moth because of the proboscis?