Today’s choice
Previous poems
Susan Jane Sims
Waiting
For Mark
After you died,
someone asked:
What was it like
in those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
I was not waiting.
Wanting, yes. Hoping, yes. For more days.
Finding joy in small things,
a game of Camel Cup, your favourite songs
and singing them with you,
reading to you
talking,
until you could no longer do
any of those things.
And then I watched your breath
entering and leaving a body
that had endured so much
and still remained beautiful.
We became a circle around you
just as you had asked us to:
your mum, your dad, your brothers,
your best friend.
We went with you as far
as it was possible to go.
Susan Jane Sims most recent collection is Splitting Sunlight (Dempsey & Windle, 2019). She publishes poetry through her Dorset based publishing company Poetry Space . She has been a poet in schools for Threshold Prize and a judge for the Poetry by Heart competition. She was a Hawthornden fellow in 2018.
Rachael Davey
That particular, chemical clarity,
sun into blue, ripples on the ceiling.
Rare days when water rests
between the ropes, unbroken . . .
Christopher M James
I suppose
this beautiful bright dawn
is the sky trying to offset
the wild gusts of last night
like a rescue mission…
Chrissy Banks
. . . Yes, I’ve tasted pomegranates
and I know what they do. The sense of vertigo:
happily dizzy at first, as if you’ve downed
a bottle of Shiraz or Merlot. You live by night . . .
Jenny Hockey
I knew the earth rolling by
was red, smelt its tang on the wind,
felt woods weighing green
Karen Luke
My sister’s father wound is the flush cut
on the bark where she lost her foothold
and fell,
the trunk burning red between her thighs
all the way down the tree to the ground…
Suzanna Fitzpatrick
Half five. The sky thickens to darkness
through the grime on the tall windows,
the claw marks of rain. Someone whistles
in the corridor…
Robin Vaughan-Williams
Something is pulling at my T-shirt.
Something is holding my hand.
I can feel it walking beside me…
Chen-ou Liu
snow crystals
on my neighbor’s windows …
Foreclosure askew
& more
Greek Feature Day 5 with Vasiliki Albedo, Tim Taylor, Lisa Kelly and Rebecca Tiger
Club Hydra Vasiliki Albedo's poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Oxford Poetry, The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, Magma, The Rialto, and elsewhere. She won the 2023 Hammond House International Literary Prize and the Poetry Society's...