Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sue Moules
BLACKBIRD IN THE EARLY MORNING
Sings at the top of the bare-branched tree
an aubade to morning
welcomes the light,
early spring, season of nest-making.
This melody is not for me
but to attract a mate.
I walk the dog under the dulcet notes
and think he sings for me.
Blackbird on the verge
gathers small sticks in his orange beak,
lifts into the sky where
tree branches hold shapes of air.
Blackbird tugging worms out of grass
to feed his young,
always singing even at night
falling notes of: keep away, keep away.
Sue Moules has been published in New Welsh Review, Planet, Poetry Wales, and Ambit. She also has poems included in the International Women’s Day anthology (Welsh Women’s Coalition 2010), By Ways Anthology (Arachne ) 2024, and Words on Troubled Waters (Lutra Press) 2024. Her poem ‘Walking the Whippet’ was chosen for Brighton and Hove Poems on the Buses (2024). Her most recent collection is The Moth Box (Parthian).
Jim Murdoch
Some things we hold in trust,
some we forget we even own
and then there’re those items
we hang onto “just in case.”
Andrew McDonnell on Father’s Day
Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...
Anna Lewis
With the neon-splashed night at the window
I counted each contraction down, obediently,
as my mother had told me to do.
Bobbie Sparrow
You ask me why
I put myself through that,
as if I jumped out of a plane
14,000 feet of fear and longing.
Chris Rice
You wake up (so you tell me)
to the lurid gold of summer
splashed like paint across
your tea-brown walls
Karin Molde
Fortuna rolls the dice in Tumahole Free State, South Africa I have never seen a baby so tiny outside a womb. You hold her jigsaw of bones in a blanket, afraid to scatter the pieces in case they’d sail like seeds onto the road. A dung beetle rolls...
Siobhan Ward
The Renault rocks left to right, waddles up an unmade road, squeezes through the trees.
Robin Houghton
I’m looking through a lattice of magnolia
not yet ready to blow open its thousand furring buds—
every year the same urgency—
Lesley Graham
I like soft grass, the sort you see
in early spring sprouting from
improbable interstices,