Today’s choice
Previous poems
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri
Glory of the Blacker Berry
Today. Let us forget the blunt-edged sorrows.
Remember the black joys, my darker brother—
the high laughter of women, the bright, unbothered
stride of boys. We have died more times than the days
have names, yet here is the breath. The living.
Don’t you want it all? To inhabit the skin to the fullest?
The chain days have passed, and the cotton days,
the caged days, the muted-color days. Let them go.
What matters now is the feast of this survival.
The glory of our own light, black light.
Look at us: the deeper the root, the sweeter the juice.
Glory of the blacker berry, split wide open to the sun.
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri is a Ghanaian poet whose work has appeared/forthcoming in Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review and North American Review. Winner of the 2025 African Writers Award and runner-up for the 2026 Cambridge Poetry Prize. Instagram @poetraniel
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.
Patrick Wright
It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.
William Collins
We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.
Oz Hardwick
The ghost of my mother knows the names of everything, but
she can’t tell me, because ghosts, whatever you have heard
to the contrary, can’t speak.