Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jan FitzGerald
Old Age
What is not to love
when you draw back curtains
and taste clouds
in their newness and innocence
or watch the sky
raise its brass trumpet
in a call to gratitude.
What is not to love about
the air on your skin,
each breath a new miracle
or the sound
of a small bird’s song,
the gift a tree offers
welcoming you back to the world.
Jan FitzGerald is a NZ poet with publication overseas including Atlanta Review, Loch Raven Review, Voegelin View, The London Magazine, The High Window, Allegro, Acumen, Orbis and Gutter. Shortlisted twice in the Bridport Poetry Prize, she has five poetry books published.
Peter Devonald
He is bitterest regrets,
dark chocolate, olives and kale,
The Telegraph and Magritte’s
pipe, the treachery of images.
Anne Ryland
Restless two-hundred-year-old village elder,
a ragged playground of words, or is it weeds –
fragments of chant to slaps of skipping rope.
Colin Dardis
I have never climbed a tree,
never broken a bone
and will never walk on water.
May Garner
The house keeps score
in places no one checks any longer.
Sally Spiers
Night’s white noise is over. Day arises
to stillness. Light crouches behind windows
Tim Brookes
In the charity shop I try on a coat
flocked with fake shearling,
shaved-soft almost: fibres
fired onto plastic to fool the wrist.
Kim Waters
You’re a character, a Roman numeral,
an internet meme. Descendant
from a peasant’s crook or cattle prod,
you’re the twelfth letter of the alphabet,
Sylvie Jane Lewis
Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.
At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.
Maryam Alsaeid
Maybe after your bath—
you will sit for a moment,
the towel will hold you close
like a quiet prayer—