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.

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.

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.