Today’s choice
Previous poems
Anne Stewart
03:41 Downstairs
a poem for insomniacs
Huddled on the cat’s blanket,
hyenas crying through the night.
Scribbled notes regretting tea,
the need for light.
Time passes, shoulders settle the hyenas
to a quiet shout.
Everything goes cold as energy, as will,
goes out
and him, snoring like a mammoth on
temazepam upstairs.
Sleep, hyenas, sleep.
There, there…
It’s just the sound of safety
winnowing the air.
Anne Stewart created and runs the poet showcase http://www.poetrypf.co.uk. She has won the Bridport Prize and Poetry on the Lake’s Silver Wyvern, and has published 5 poetry collections, the latest: The Last Parent and any minute now. https://www.facebook.com/anne.
Irene Cunningham
Lavender seeps. I expect my limbs to leaden, lead the body down through sheet, mattress-cover, into the machinery of sleep where other lives exist.
Graham Clifford
The Still Face Experiment
You must have seen that Youtube clip
where a mother lets her face go dead.
Her toddler carries on burbling for twenty to thirty seconds until she realises there is nothing coming back to her.
Susan Jane Sims
After you died,
someone asked:
What was it like
in those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
Jane Frank
I imagine returning to the house.
Furniture is piled up in the rain—
the ideas that won’t fit.
Ilias Tsagas
I used to dial your number to hear your voice. I would hold the receiver for a long time as if your voice was trapped inside . . .
Jim Paterson
Shove it, that farewell
and the sky shimmering with frost
and the waves wrecking on the shore
Philip Rush
Tom’s advice, mind you,
was to drink hot chocolate
last thing at night
on a garden bench
beneath the moon.
Rosie Jackson
Today, I talked with a friend about death
and what it means to have arrived in my life
before I have to leave it . . .
Mariam Saidan
they said sing in private,
Zan shouldn’t sing.