Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gemma Blakeley
My Dad Complains That The Hedges Are Overgrown
and the word bemuses me, implying as it does
the concept of excess in what can only be good.
Why do we crave these straight lines and
clean edges? The hedge itself
is a border, a defining.
A this is mine.
And this is yours.
A there and here.
An us and them.
Why not let it keep a little wildness?
Not for me this lopping and shaping,
this trimming and taming,
ruling and restricting-
Hear this- there are things
which cannot be governed, like
certain tendrilous tendencies
of a hedgerow heart
and those sacred things which live inside…
Father, I will not reach for the blade.
There is no such thing as too alive.
Gemma Blakeley is a teacher, mother, nature-lover and aspiring writer. She will have her first poetry published in Black Bough Poetry‘s Winter 2026 Anthology later this year. She lives in Shropshire with her husband, two children and the cat.
Kate Leah Hewett
Sorry, but I’ve stopped
cleaning the windows.
Winifred Mok
Perhaps it’s because
I look like
I’m just passing through
Col Fleetwood
Unmoored on an ocean of heather
no wind to pluck the strings
of the aeolian harp
Amlanjyoti Goswami
Those night boats are back.
Fishermen string their nets
Counting fresh catch.
Brian Kirk
That was the time you caught
the mumps and I was half
afraid I’d catch it too.
Dawn Sands
Walking home from the lecture on Frankenstein
through the November mizzle, small breaths of exhaust
sighing in the twilight headlights, particles of wet air commingling.
Ken Evans
Octopus I am one Like short of being beautiful. Five hundred more Followers, I’m away to fight culture wars. I Block two for lies Quora does not verify. Counter-factuals are ok, there’s simmering wastelands to make out of vague, but someone sent a shroom...
Mary Mulholland
It doesn’t trust paper. It writes itself
in my head where no one can reach it,
laugh, tear it to shreds, or
call it a waste of space, a disgrace.
Afolabi Ezra
It was a quiet day—
no bad news,
no sudden loss,
no reason to hold my breath.