Today’s choice
Previous poems
Martin Fisher
Old Empress
Inside, in the half-light, the iron rot took hold.
Forgotten service–obsolete.
Salt-coin neglect.
The money flowed inland,
Moored on an hourglass choke.
No one told the sea.
Orange hull still bright,
Empress her name- cracked white letters,
leans on driftwood where the rails once were.
Salt wind gnaws old paint
one winter at a time — loyal watch keeper.
Fifty years it cut through any storm.
Now the roof sags —
a shroud to a queen.
Gulls cry, a ghost crew in the fret.
A quatrain left —
for this worn craft
tide,
sand, rust
and lament.
Martin Fisher is a debut poet, aged 65, with a working background spanning Africa and Europe. He is a professional gardener living in Sussex, where he enjoys cultivating his garden and restoring antiques, all while writing with his wife and two dogs, Eli and Juno. He can be found on X @mjfkipper and on Facebook @martin.fisher.148
Julia Webb
Because a woman woke up
and her head had become a flower.
Freyr Thorvaldsson
A candle eats away at air
At the same rate that we do
Konstandinos (Dino) Mahoney
A teacher guides his pupils past headless marble torsos,
dusty cabinets of tiny Attic coins, pockmarked stylobates,
to a large clay pithos . . .
Maggie Brookes-Butt
For you, with your toddler bendiness,
the squat is a natural, easy position
while I hurt-strain, thinking of miners
crouched outside their front doors
Sally Michaelson
Heads under bonnets
mechanics catch a wiff
of a girl passing
Carmen Marcus
extract from The Keen Is ar scath a Chéile a mhaireann na daoine: It is in the shadow of each other we live. Watching with the dying. Travelling with the dead. Phyllida Anam-Áire; The Celtic Book of Dying, Findhorn Press, Vermont, 2022 Àite...
Nina Parmenter
When The Threat of Hell Failed
God created the lanyard,
Bel Wallace
Month by month I felt my muscles harden
these hefty horns grew from my long skull
Stephen Keeler
Something about arriving somewhere new
just as afternoon is leaving . . .