Today’s choice
Previous poems
Steven Taylor
SPORTS NEWS
A very long time ago
Stephen Fry’s godfather, the
Justice, Sir Oliver Popplewell
Who chaired the inquiry
Into the Bradford City
Stadium fire that killed
56 football watchers, contrasted
The quiet dignity of those relatives
With the behaviour of the relatives
Of the Hillsborough victims, who
Were forever blaming other people
Instead of accepting
It is the lot of the working class
To suffer in all divisions
They should be grateful
For whatever leisure
They are granted
By their masters, betters
Sir Oliver was a cricketer
Wicket keeper batsman
16 stumpings 60-something catches
After Charterhouse
He went to Cambridge, studied
Steven Taylor was born and raised in Hyde, near Manchester. He now lives in Kilburn, London. Steven’s poems have been widely published in journals including Acumen, Magma, Poetry Business Coal anthology, Stand, The North and The Wallace Stevens Journal. He can be found on Facebook @steventaylorpoetry
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 . . .
Geraldine Stoneham
The silence and peace of this place
creeps through on birdsong.
Emma Lee
The instruction invites overthinking:
describe your hometown through
the medium of simple sentences