Today’s choice
Previous poems
Trelawney
What is holding you back from building your wormery?
You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
And no lack of wood – an affluence of pallet offcuts. Here –
the frames are half-made! Is it the fear of getting it wrong?
Of irreversible mistakes now drilled in. The commitment
to a design that might not ultimately lead to compost.
Is it the threat of foxes – always the foxes – that you might
aid their survival? Or the lack of a lid to keep it all in?
Is it the prospect of no longer having a wormery to build?
Of being someone who is no longer building a wormery.
Someone done with DIY. Done with improvements. With no purpose left.
Of being someone who even builds a wormery.
But you will keep it, as an unfinished testimony. A celebration
of indecision. And one day decomposed small print might
mingle with castoffs, for the worms to make sense of it all.
Trelawney has featured in the Bridport and Winchester Poetry Prizes and Munster Literature Centre’s International Chapbook Competition; and has work published in the Broken Sleep anthologies of modern Cornish poets and on masculinity, Magma, Southword, and elsewhere. Iinsta.BenTrelawney
Jessica Mookherjee for International Women’s Day
The pain comes plucked from a field
in a garland of sunlight.
Jenny Pagdin for International Women’s Day
After many moons
I am perhaps readying to speak.
Kate Noakes for International Women’s Day
Each year in March, on the eighth day,
the one we’re allowed to call ours,
slowly, Jess reads our names . . .
Julia Webb for International Women’s Day
hoover witch mum / mum on the rocks / mum’s coach horses / all the king’s mums /
Sue Burge for International Women’s Day
speaks whale, speaks star
breathes in — tight as a tomb
breathes out — splintered crackle
Gill Connors for International Women’s Day
Rack and stretch her, loosen flesh
from bone. A jointed bird will not squawk.
Helen Ivory for International Women’s Day
A woman somewhere is typing on the internet
my heart wakes me up like clockwork.
Hélène Demetriades
At breakfast my man sticks a purple
magnolia bud in my soft boiled egg.
The flower opens, distilling to lilac.
Stuart Henson
Sometimes I’m surprised there’s light
in dark places, those corridors, those alleys
where you wouldn’t stray if you didn’t need