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
Hannah Linden
I was cutlery left out in the rain, rusty
by morning, a side-slipping fiddlestick
desperate for music, starved for company.
Eve Chancellor
Imagine waking up one day and discovering
that you are a horse. At first, you might not
believe it and think you are dreaming.
Ananya S Guha
The leaves are growing out of
a harangue of loneliness
palms cupped I listen to silences
of winter or summers
Peter Leight
Instead of Dying I’m Taking a Trip
to Kansas
where the light appears
as if walking through a gate
in the air
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
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
Rosie Jackson
I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying
Charlotte Holm, Jennifer A McGowan
A leaky drainpipe drips
creating damp patches on uneven paving,
slime green algae blossoms
forming viridescent ripples
James McDermott
if samsara’s concrete please don’t come back
as black jackal for I live in Norwich
nor spineless worm as I don’t have a lawn
Cheryl Snell, Alice Gregorio, Peter Lilly
I grew up on a farm so I should know all about expensive cows and free milk. You’re taking being a debutante much too literally. We only meant to give permission for you to make a good match, not flit among the suitable boys…