Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ian C. Webb
Finistère
June 23rd – 24th, 2016
Two table’s worth of no-longer strangers
at dusk on a lane of nautical miles,
basket of bread, bottles of wine, talk of home
and places called home; watching the beams
of the continent’s light, see a lava-red sun
shrink to a flame at the earth’s ‘very edge’ —
edge of Ostrava, Riga, Leipzig, Graz.
At 5.00 a.m. news from home on every screen;
I wipe the sleep from the blink of an eye,
my shoulders slumped on the rail of the deck —
see the creature’s strut, its busy beak,
obsessed, obnoxious, the ruler of waves.
I am buried at sea, consigned to a martial,
barnacled, wreck; a grubby ghost, I stink of the past.
Ian C. Webb lives in Yorkshire. Recently graduated from the University of York with an M.A. in Poetry & Poetics, his work has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, Cathexis North-West Press, French Literary Review, Snakeskin and The Charles Carter.
Ken Cockburn
We slept as best we could on the night train.
Leaving the station we walked empty streets
aimlessly until turning a corner
there it was, silent and vast as the moon.
Tim Dwyer
On the pitch of the roof
a jackdaw holds a twig
longer than its wingspan—
do corvids feel pride?
Genna Gardini
go back, small cell, atom
slit by light. It takes up
space, an ocean, a planet, a
Fran Hayden
a friend messaged me:
“every time I see sunflowers,
I think of you”
Betty Doyle
Both cast out to sea, I wonder –
did your ashes ever meet?
It was under the same sun setting,
although years and miles apart.
Mark Rutter
when the people are gone
and the wooden house
has been burned down
to recover its nails
Gráinne Daly
Not for me the tomb of Irish soil.
Put me on a plane
and let me make one last journey
before my final departure.
Rebecca Cohen
If you don’t believe in God, my friend says,
why don’t you eat pork?
Rhian Thomas
On my phone a newsreel shows a car boot lifting
just above the flood. Tail lights like eyes
caught in a comic gasp, while its body, like the carriageway,
lies under sixty million litres of last night’s rain.