Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jean Atkin
Lighting the Strangers into the cave
for Celia Fiennes, who rode 3000 miles around England on horseback in 1697
She hears the locals call it
the Devil’s Arse.
the hill on one End jutting out
in two parts and joyns in one at ye top
this Cleft between you Enter a great Cave
She creeps under the opening, then stands.
Her guide passes her the stub of a candle,
holds up his own to show the ceiling rock.
She hears the drip of water. In her riding skirt
that sweeps the ground, her narrow, heeled boots,
Celia clambers over stones and under stalactites
there is often Cause of Stooping very Low to pass by
and ye Rocks do drip water in many places
wch makes it damp and strikes Cold to you
haveing Lost ye sight of day
Although a Puritan, Celia writes it in her diary:
‘the Devil’s Arse’.
She is less prudish than the men
who come exploring
a generation later, resort
to asterisks.
Jean Atkin’s third full collection High Nowhere is was published last year by IDP. Previous publications include How Time is in Fields (IDP); The Bicycles of Ice and Salt (IDP) and Fan-peckled (Fair Acre Press). She is a poet in education and community. www.jeanatkin.com
Philip Gross
This is the song of the cells’
soft throb, the quivering coherences,
their shuffling the profit and loss
of life, to have and to hold.
Jenny Hope
No man can hold me.
See –
I blur the line between days . . .
Damaris West
In the circle
of its trees
the lochan shines
midnight silk.
B. Anne Adriaens
symptoms she is aggregate concrete and grit held together in a human shape lying on her side knees drawn up flesh tensing to stone and tendons in flames the weight of her body pressed into the mattress leaves a shallow hollow once she’s gone a...
Martin Potter
glimmer blades
the field’s lightly fogged
grass green
Moira McPartlin
Outside the Berber tent
the poet and I contemplate
the boundless Sahara sky.
Matthew James Friday
We totem our empires with the raptor,
weave into flags, fix on coins
but what of the victims?
How come no one ever glories the fish . . .
Ansuya Patel
Think what it must have been like for her
fasting from sunrise to moonrise, to wake up
three hours before dawn, bathe, apply sindoor
on the parting of her hair line . . .
Chris Beckett
Zerihun drove him over the dead-cow hills and Bob’s long hair stood up with shock at what he saw.