Today’s choice
Previous poems
Phil Vernon
Something (almost) understood
Firle Beacon, South Downs
These hills that look towards both weald and waves
hold – in their homesteads, fenced and open land,
trackways and contours – all that’s happened here,
but hide their mysteries in riddles: how
whole flints were wrapped – by nature’s sleight of hand –
in chalk laid down as plankton long ago,
how giants squeezed the land to form a dome
aeons of wind and rain made disappear,
why hills were shaped with steep or shallow sides,
how minor streams once cut their way through towering
tons of rock and soil to reach the sea,
how continents and islands drifted casually;
why ancient people scraped and heaped the earth
to make these hilltop mounds now overgrown;
why this stone church fell into disrepair.
Did prophets and messiah walk where books describe,
know what we’re told – and wish to believe – they knew?
Did what they said mean what we read or hear?
And did they speak with whom the writings say?
Did simple silence also serve as prayer,
as simple silence serves, up here, today?
Phil Vernon is retired, after an international peacebuilding and humanitarian career. His most recent collection is Guerilla Country (Flight of the Dragonfly, 2024). www.philvernon.net
Gordan Struić
Outside,
the city slides by,
blurred lines
of glass and rain.
Stephen Keeler
The days were huge and kind
and sometimes after school
we’d buy a bag of broken biscuits
for the long walk home
across the heavy heat of afternoon
on lucky days she wouldn’t take
the pennies offered up in supplication
Joseph Blythe
I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..
Denise Bundred
Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.
Rahma O. Jimoh
A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.
Samuel A. Adeyemi
I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,
the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel