Today’s choice
Previous poems
Chris Hardy
Memento Vivere
We lived here once.
The rain we heard
fell everywhere.
Silence except the wind
across the ground.
It’s best to keep quiet.
Words are like dead seeds,
they vanish when they’re said.
*
New Year’s Eve
without stars or moon.
I believe they are there
in their own light.
Faith goes deeper
than knowledge.
It is dawn for any soul awake
around the farthest star.
*
Sometimes if you can find it
life is worth the work.
The future’s always young,
we get younger by the minute.
Here and now goes quickly,
where is it?
Soon instead of moving away
the horizon will turn back
and pull the sky down like a lid.
Remember to live.
Chris Hardy has lived and travelled all over the world and is now in Sussex. His poems have won prizes and been widely published. His last collection, Key to the Highway, was published by Shoestring Press.
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…
Jade Kleiner
There is the green that birthed all pine trees.
Tom Blake
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.
Kate Bonfield
Coming home to days of heat
trapped beyond the door, to time skewed
by time away, the house bigger and
smaller than before.
Precious Ejim
I don’t know why I look to my mother
for her shadow never stays.
Jackson
I want to tell my mother,
I made a successful loaf
in the bread machine you didn’t know
you were leaving me
Kath Mckay
How to become two-dimensional
Die. You’re soon reduced to a photograph.
Lugubrious Co-op undertakers will zip you in a bag
and keep you cold . . .
Cindy Botha
atlas bear
black-footed ferret
cape lion