Today’s choice
Previous poems
May Grier
That Three-Tusked Beast
I wasn’t to know
that it was a three-tusked
beast; that there was not one,
not two, but three
that grew the seed of me.
Back then, who’d ever heard
of that unlikely jungle lore?
In school there was room
for two, no more: a mum
and a dad. My skin grew hot
when it was time to present
our tree. On both sides
I wrote ma mère in extra-small,
traced their faces faint, idly
added cousins I’d never known
to an ivory branch. I could never
quite get to the nub of truth–
always rubbing the animal
out, never letting it wander in to flick
its tail, wave its trunk around.
My inside-beast was so strong.
It didn’t let intruders in. It didn’t
take kindly to being found out.
May Grier (she/her) was born and lives in London and works a nurse. This is her first published poem.
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...