Today’s choice
Previous poems
Bill Jones
Three Jackdaws
Three jackdaws walked widdershins
around the birdfeeding station. A fat woodpigeon,
pompous, hieratic,
tried to undo their magic
by walking from four to six. For a moment,
the two birdfeeders, full of seeds and nuts,
were the pillars of the Temple.
I wondered what it spelled for the day ahead
as I watched their spells, this augury-pokery.
Bill Jones is a poet and illustrator who lives in Gloucestershire, UK, with a small dog and an interest in magic. His poems have appeared in anthologies from Yew Tree Press and his cartoons have appeared in Private Eye and Poetry Review.
Mark Smith
In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected
Toby Cotton
A blustery day –
the wind too strong for kites
or for lifts to the sky.
“To a thoughtful spot,” it cites
and pins me to the earth.
Ansuya Patel
except this burnt red vase.
Hand shaped in the muffled roar,
devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth.
Hannah Ward
Look, Drew, the
plums are in
pieces beneath
us. I dreamt:
Andrea Small
a flower is not a heron
does not stand on one leg
spear-billed over golden carp
Usha Kishore
At dawn and dusk, my father
becomes a chant, that flies above
the courtyard of the old house
Jane Frank
The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen
but that I will learn to expect
and there’s a fracas-induced full moon
Clara Howell
The way a halved peach breathes, then rots
from the inside out.
Luigi Coppola
Out of ten bars, by the fifth, half of us had flickered
out and by this ninth one, it ended up just him
and me. A matchstick balanced on a stool, he sat