Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kate Hendry
Burning the Years
Lay down the worst ones –
raze them like swathes
of heather on the moor.
So what if there’s a dead patch.
Remember the havoc
unfettered fire makes –
flames twirl along the ridge,
tumble down the gorge.
Unbreathable heat and ash.
So burn those years
till there’s a dead plot of earth
and disaster’s spurned.
Behind you – safe beds of moss.
Ahead – untouched mounds
of rush like stepping stones.
Spin in the steam and smoke,
jump on the blackened years
sprung like a dance hall floor.
Kate Hendry‘s poems have been widely published in magazines, including PN Review, The Rialto and Poetry Wales. Her first pamphlet, The Lost Original, was published by Happenstance Press. Her second, MX SIMP (Mariscat Press) was shortlisted for the 2023 Michael Marks Awards.
Philip Gross
Enough of scorch, scald, sore- and rawness.
Sometimes flesh longs for eclipse.
Nick Allen
she told me about the still hours
spent at the coast watching the east
Phil Vernon
Because we were four
and I only had strength to carry one
and knew no other way
I carried the one who called out loudest;
threatened us most.
Patrick Deeley
As you rummage of a morning
among dust-furred personal effects
jumbled in an old
wooden suitcase under a bed . . .
Terry Jones
The Lake District Tourist Board
has had no input into what
you are now reading, but I so
miss Cumbria in Holy Week
Mary Mulholland
Who will pick the apples now she’s gone?
Samantha Carr
She has few secrets with her translucent map skin of blue underground rivers visible to scale.
Alison Patrick
A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters . . .
Julie Egdell
At the shore of impossibility
last moments come to nothing
all our plans die in the salt air
of another new day on the black sea.