Today’s choice
Previous poems
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
The Lean-to Glasshouse
Its timber frame held together by the waste
of its own decay
The rot a kind of glue undisturbed
Cracked panes of glass hold their fractures
still
Hearts tongue ferns grow beneath
the dripping tap
And at the end in the damp where
all the water pools at the bottom of the sloping
shingle path
Bricks crumble to dust
Their profile left behind
miniature terracotta towns in relief
Grey plastic sockets intrude
Dried cardoon heads hang upside down
from routed conduit pipe
Loose stacks of brick and timber slats
make staging for rows and rows of potted
plants
This is where things grow
The wind threatens with a conditioned
response
So I cup my hands to catch it
And wait for somebody to say
words like short unexpected illness
And devastating loss
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki is a gardener and writer from Birmingham, England. He writes about trees and plants (mostly) and people (sometimes) and other unimportant things. His work has featured widely both in print and online.
Phil Vernon
Because we were four
and I only had strength to carry one
and knew no other way
I carried the one who called out loudest;
threatened us most.
Patrick Deeley
As you rummage of a morning
among dust-furred personal effects
jumbled in an old
wooden suitcase under a bed . . .
Terry Jones
The Lake District Tourist Board
has had no input into what
you are now reading, but I so
miss Cumbria in Holy Week
Mary Mulholland
Who will pick the apples now she’s gone?
Samantha Carr
She has few secrets with her translucent map skin of blue underground rivers visible to scale.
Alison Patrick
A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters . . .
Julie Egdell
At the shore of impossibility
last moments come to nothing
all our plans die in the salt air
of another new day on the black sea.
Elena Chamberlain
My trans friends and I just want to go swimming
in cold water
without a thousand eyes watching.
Regina Weinert
It was the snatch of a dream,
someone said this is not
what you do in the desert,
it was one precise thing, not a list . . .