Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ned Vessey
Conversations
My father and I
skim the surface of conversations
something like those swallows do
down at the lake
instantaneous precision
of withheld effort
brief furrows
of beak and wing
on water’s brows.
But sometimes we forget
ourselves
the pub sends us
into the drink. Cormorants
beaks that know
surgery of water
peel back gloom and grit
until the innermost things
of the lake choke
writhe on the shoreline
unaccustomed
to the scrutiny of light.
Fearful we let the lake
have them back
and no one says a word.
Ned Vessey writes poetry and prose about landscape, people and place. His prose has been featured in The Guardian, Slightly Foxed Quarterly and The Clearing. His poetry has appeared in The Dark Mountain. He lives in Bath.
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.
Sue Norton
Today I tipped the packet of coffee
into the cafetiere instead of the tin.
Caught myself in time, didn’t pour water in.