Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jim Murdoch
Love is…
…inconvenient. Love is untidy. Love is relentless, ruthless and rapacious.
Done well, it’s hilarious, playful and redemptive – Gina Barreca
(for Carrie)
We don’t decide who we love.
Who we hate, yes,
who we’re jealous of,
but never who we end up loving.
It’s not fate or anything—
that would be silly—
but it is out of our control
and often bloody inconvenient.
But, seriously, what do you do?
Love is like a stray dog
that finds its way to your door
that even a cat person can’t turn away.
Jim Murdoch is a Scottish writer living in Cumbernauld. He’s been writing for over fifty years and his list of rejections is voluminous but he keeps at it. He’s written most things over the years—novels, stories, songs, even plays—but he thinks of himself primarily as a poet and is currently producing poems at an unpresented pace. There are worse things to be doing in your sixties.
Sreeja Naskar
glass-tooth morning.
salt mouth.
i left the stove on just to feel wanted.
Gordan Struić
Still —
I kept
writing.
Sometimes
just:
“Hi.”
Margaret Poynor-Clark
Inside my bedroom I take a fresh blade
pull off my jumper, examine the ladder
in front of the mirror cut through my laces
rung by rung
Jenny Hockey
That’s when she went to ground,
after she disobeyed, painted her plastic tea set
red, hidden away in the playhouse they built
down where bindweed draped
Sue Proffitt
You and I have had many talks since you died.
Nick Cooke
If when you go to the barber today
He asks if you’d like him to ‘tidy up your ears’,
Think of all the wildest sprawling vegetation
That will never be tidied, or trimmed, by clippers or shears,
Edward Alport
High up, out of reach,
on a branch, no, more a twig,
a little wizened, shrunken face leers down.
Colin Pink
not the kind you eat with
but useful to turn the soil
root out potatoes or carrots
Linda Ford
My Father Bought a Signal Box
dismantled it piece by piece
then sold the wood, as a job lot.