Today’s choice
Previous poems
J.P. Lancaster
Ivy’s deference and not
Ivy thrives
despite dependency.
It hangs on, has its other day.
Ivy does not press its case.
Its patient face is no surprise.
It does not draw attention to itself.
Its business is in secretive delight.
It’s second violin to any other instrument.
It clings with tendril anchor feet establishing a base.
As if from nothing, when the time is right
its berries burst like fronds of aubergine-dark rain,
September elder, glossy, orderly and plump,
its umbel firework pulses bursting to be seen.
It later desiccates, but not
from tiredness, resolved maturity
frayed hemp strands on the vine.
Ivy’s complexity is fabulous.
Self-effacement underlining paradox,
write-in evergreen of posts,
single oaks with one bare fractured branch
in need of first response,
shipwrecked in a roadside hedge,
whitewashed walls
which failed to wash behind their ears,
and then turned flaky sour
anything upstanding marginal.
Ivy’s deference,
harm-free cohabiting,
which burgeons bright, as self-defence.
J.P. Lancaster was born in Cardiff and brought up in Barry, Vale of Glamorgan. He was educated at St John’s College, Oxford, which came as a shock. He has taught in various countries.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel
Mariah Whelan
St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...
Marissa Glover
What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a...
Cherry Doyle
/ on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain /
Jennie E. Owen
and in that last moment
the dead shrug, shake
off their boots, shuffle off
jackets and shirts,
Martin Figura for Mental Health Awareness Week
Children in care do not have much of a voice, they often accept whatever is given and do not dare to speak up.
Julie Stevens for Mental Health Awareness Week
Are these the words you want me to say
about how my day became a raging river
crashing through my bones?
Fianna Russell Dodwell for Mental Health Awareness Week
I’ll tell you a bedtime story . . .