Today’s choice
Previous poems
Col Fleetwood
Muckle Flugga
Unmoored on an ocean of heather
no wind to pluck the strings
of the aeolian harp
Policed by the unsettling glare
of nesting great skuas
we tread the narrow path
The boardwalk rises and falls
under a sky empty
and scoured of song
To the lighthouse
in search of the solan goose
we press on
Until all land ends
pearl-studded cliffs rear up
to arrest us
And the pitch of the sea
snares the unquiet silence
of our voices
Col Fleetwood lives and writes in the wild and beautiful borderlands between Scotland and England.
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.
Elena Chamberlain
My trans friends and I just want to go swimming
in cold water
without a thousand eyes watching.