Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rebecca Wheatley
Muscle memory
He thought his heart was broken yet the day began again.
He couldn’t marvel in the shine of sunsets rising and falling
and yet he rose and fell in turn.
His hands resigned themselves to tea making
and his legs carried him much the same.
He bundled her belongings into bin liners
and his heart told him it was not her in those bags,
reminded him of her wisdom and her nonsense,
showed her soft face enveloped in the folds of drawn curtains.
His heart hammered so relentlessly he struggled to hold on to it.
Caught unawares by her handwriting on a scribbled note,
her smile in a photo he hadn’t seen,
a grieving friend he couldn’t remember.
Swelling and contracting it sounded the rhythm of his day,
asking so much of him that he sometimes had to lay down and hide.
Not broken, conjuring love from the loss with every last muscle.
His heart had never worked so hard or been more alive.
Rebecca Wheatley is poet, actress and singer in Brighton. She tours her own one woman shows with music and has poems published in The tide rises , Dreitch, Bindweed, Porridge, The New Ulster’ ,Southlight. Galway Review and Salzburg Journal.
Pat Edwards
He is in white-out, stopped in his tracks,
dying for the comfort of a fag.
He makes a chalice around the flame,
hands becoming shield so he can light up.
Pamilerin Jacob
Annette the gap-toothed,
You kissed a man & I was born. You gave him
your laughter & he built an empire,
Fatihah Quadri Eniola
There is an album of all the men
your mother have loved. It sits every
night in the deep silence of the
basement.
Nathan Evans
If they ask where I am, tell them: I am
wintering. I have secreted small acorns
of sadness in crevices of gnarled limbs
and shall be savouring their bitternesses
on the back of my tongue until the days
lengthen.
Jim Ferguson
we can travel anywhere
she winks, but let’s rest here
in amongst these words
a moment can take a while
Gabrielle Meadows
I am tearing the peel from an orange gently and somewhere
Far away a tree falls in a forest and we
don’t hear it but the ground does and the birds do
Hongwei Bao
Every five minutes it does its job,
hoovers every inch of her memory,
declutters all pains and sorrows.
Gary Day
And once the father frowned
As the boy struggled to fasten
The drawbridge on his fort.
‘He’ll never be any good
With his hands’ he declared,
As if the boy wasn’t there.
Royal Rhodes
Perhaps the friends of Lazarus, who died
and slipped his shroud, on seeing him might swoon
or rush to hear the tales of that beyond
they hoped and feared to face.