Today’s choice
Previous poems
Seán Street
Candlelight
We lit a candle for you
that day in Sacre Coeur,
under its white-flame dome
as high as Paris could go
and still be Paris, stood there
awhile as the dark fire
caught, aspiring to spirit,
then turned as the dusk church rang
with candles, remembering
beers and salades gourmand
in the streets by the Sorbonne
held by a small fountain of light
that became the pole star
for this blank page, and which
as far as I know burns still
as high as Paris can go,
and Sacre Coeur, escaping
like you the prison of shape
through this small portal, glows white.
Seán Street’s latest is Running Out of Time (Shoestring Press, 2024). Prose includes works on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Dymock Poets, as well as a number of studies of sound poetics, the latest of which, Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong was published by Bloomsbury, (paperback edition in May, 2025.) Previous prose includes The Poetry of Radio, The Memory of Sound and The Sound of a Room, published by Routledge. He has worked in audio production for more than 50 years and lives in Liverpool. He is emeritus professor at Bournemouth University.
Sarah Rowland Jones
The terns lift as one
from the salt-pools behind the beach
– a thick undulating line
Jean O’Brien
Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted,
birds peck with blunted beaks,
pushing up are the blind green pods
of what will soon be yellow daffodils,
given light and air.
Jean Atkin
We scoured the parish tip most weeks, when we were kids.
We clambered it in wellies. Ferals, we scavenged
in the debris of the adults’ lives.
Sally Festing
Life lines still arc round the base of each thumb
though the bulk of hand’s muscle mass
Joe Crocker
There was always, of course, the cold
– its freezing pretty fingerprints on our side of the pane.
Julie Sheridan
They married in a chapel of black steel
bars, tethered up their feathers to serve as
stained glass. . .
Maxine Sibihwana
here, water does not run. instead it
sits obediently in old plastic containers
Lesley Curwen
Her feet snagged in a cleverly-placed net
my sister waits for him to untangle her,
to hold her head still between thick fingers . . .
From the Archives: In Memory of Jean Cardy
Denizens Mice live in the London Tube. A train leaves and small pieces of sooty black detach themselves from the sooty black walls and forage for crumbs in the rubbish under the rails that are death to man. You can’t see their feet move. They...