Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rongili Biswas
Rosary peas
Girls under the tree,
one with hands clasped as in worship,
the others picking
the scarlet fallen seeds,
so they could string them,
those necklace beads.
They’ve played this game
since sun-up, and even now,
all through this windswept day,
rosary peas fall to their feet,
waiting quietly
to be gathered
and picked and gathered again
for a stringing
that will never end.
Rongili Biswas, a bilingual writer and musician from Kolkata, India, writes across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her work, published in journals and magazines internationally, explores memory, observation, and the rhythms of daily life. She has received multiple literary awards.
Gabrielle Meadows
I am tearing the peel from an orange gently and somewhere
Far away a tree falls in a forest and we
don’t hear it but the ground does and the birds do
Hongwei Bao
Every five minutes it does its job,
hoovers every inch of her memory,
declutters all pains and sorrows.
Gary Day
And once the father frowned
As the boy struggled to fasten
The drawbridge on his fort.
‘He’ll never be any good
With his hands’ he declared,
As if the boy wasn’t there.
Royal Rhodes
Perhaps the friends of Lazarus, who died
and slipped his shroud, on seeing him might swoon
or rush to hear the tales of that beyond
they hoped and feared to face.
Dmitry Blizniuk for World Poetry Day
God in his worn, greasy jeans like a car mechanic
is lighting a new life from an old one.
Jeff Skinner
It takes ages. Tell me what it is you’re after
she says, when finally I get through.
Annabelle Markwick-Staff
I devoured the Olympics, filled my mouth
and scrapbook with sticky ephemera.
Charles G. Lauder
beneath night’s skin he unearths raw stones
serrated encrusted enigmatic cold
Arlo Kean
we are at a cafe just round
the corner from hampstead
heath & sipping berry sunrise