Today’s choice
Previous poems
Raluca David
Here is a cross
You said you’d never die
here.
Here are your Sundays watching your children’s birthdays
on your screen. Here are your winters crating up grocery trucks,
pineapples scratching rough skin. Here are your summers
slating the roofs of Europe. You said you’d build
behind your elders’ house. A villa, bright orange concrete.
Here is a cross.
Upon the morning mist a divination line, a black bedsheet
a poem in dye, words fold onto each other: Hopes, Home, How
soon. A yellow T-shirt saying Ole Ole Ole. A pair of warm socks.
You will make it through, you know that much.
What through means, you don’t know.
What is on the other side
of through.
Raluca David has been shortlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri NW Prize as well as the Starkie and Dart Poetry Prizes, and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her poetry has appeared in the Oxford Review of Books. Instagram: @ralucafdavid
Ken Cockburn
We slept as best we could on the night train.
Leaving the station we walked empty streets
aimlessly until turning a corner
there it was, silent and vast as the moon.
Tim Dwyer
On the pitch of the roof
a jackdaw holds a twig
longer than its wingspan—
do corvids feel pride?
Genna Gardini
go back, small cell, atom
slit by light. It takes up
space, an ocean, a planet, a
Fran Hayden
a friend messaged me:
“every time I see sunflowers,
I think of you”
Betty Doyle
Both cast out to sea, I wonder –
did your ashes ever meet?
It was under the same sun setting,
although years and miles apart.
Mark Rutter
when the people are gone
and the wooden house
has been burned down
to recover its nails
Gráinne Daly
Not for me the tomb of Irish soil.
Put me on a plane
and let me make one last journey
before my final departure.
Rebecca Cohen
If you don’t believe in God, my friend says,
why don’t you eat pork?
Rhian Thomas
On my phone a newsreel shows a car boot lifting
just above the flood. Tail lights like eyes
caught in a comic gasp, while its body, like the carriageway,
lies under sixty million litres of last night’s rain.