Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jan FitzGerald
Old Age
What is not to love
when you draw back curtains
and taste clouds
in their newness and innocence
or watch the sky
raise its brass trumpet
in a call to gratitude.
What is not to love about
the air on your skin,
each breath a new miracle
or the sound
of a small bird’s song,
the gift a tree offers
welcoming you back to the world.
Jan FitzGerald is a NZ poet with publication overseas including Atlanta Review, Loch Raven Review, Voegelin View, The London Magazine, The High Window, Allegro, Acumen, Orbis and Gutter. Shortlisted twice in the Bridport Poetry Prize, she has five poetry books published.
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.
Brian Kirk
The train is the way,
the tracks a scar cut
deep in the land
you can’t help but touch.