Today’s choice
Previous poems
Carolyn Oulton
Autumn Fires
Unexpected as burned stone,
what am I supposed
to do with this memory?
The sudden shuffle of ash,
flames clicking like needles,
grey-cold flags. You there
just now – I can’t be sure
– perhaps about to be?
5 a.m., still curved
like wax on a bottle.
I don’t hear the taxi,
then he’s gone. I’m standing
by the window now,
a boy walks through the rain.
In the kitchen a girl, not well,
strokes her paints on water.
After lunch, rain clings
to the gutters.
A moment and a log
falls sharply, knocking smoke
across the room.
Already I know the grass
is wet outside the window.
Who it is I’m waiting for.
Carolyn Oulton is a Professor of Victorian Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. She teaches on the Creative and Professional Writing BA and is Project Co-Lead for https://kent-maps.online/. Her most recent poetry collection is Accidental Fruit (Worple). @writing_at_CCCU
Jennifer A. McGowan
You have buried your mother and put
a memorial bench on a high hillside where
the wind blows sunsets straight through
and it’s always better to wear something warm.
Matt Bryden
You used to wind yourself in curtain turning taut,
look down at your feet, pirouette
as the fabric hugged you in.
James Coghill
the undershrub, shored up,
stakes its waspish claim,
its hereabouts
Peter Bickerton
The gull
on the meadow
taps her little yellow feet
like a shovel-snouted lizard
dancing on a floor of lava
Lydia Harris
ask this place
ask the silver day
the steady horizon
the self-heal the buttercup
the hard fern in the ditch
ask the bee and the tormentil
Seán Street
Dogs in spring park light
pulled by intent wet noses
through luminous grass
Becky Cherriman
What does it wake me to
as sky is hearthed by morning
and my home warms slow?
Mark Carson
he dithers round the kitchen, lifts his 12-string from her hook,
strikes a ringing rasgueado, the echo bouncing back
emphatic from the slate flags and off the marble table.
Elizabeth Worthen
This is how (I like to think) it begins:
night-time, August, the Devon cottage, where
the darkness is so complete . . .