Today’s choice

Previous poems

Sue Norton

 

 

 

Summer’s End

Today I tipped the packet of coffee
into the cafetiere instead of the tin.
Caught myself in time, didn’t pour water in.

I’ve started to write notes to myself:
Shut bathroom window. Lock back door.
Yesterday at the bank I couldn’t remember

mini statement but I can recognise
this orange blur, this hover of wings
above abelia grandiflora, a hummingbird

hawk moth exploring the tube-flowers
with its long tongue. I sip my coffee.
Old age comes tapping up my garden path

on unsteady feet, but I’m content to watch
a flycatcher flitting up and back, up
and back to its perch on the fence post,

the hawk moth probing
trumpet by trumpet as it siphons
nectar’s last drops,

the flycatcher fluttering up to snatch
one more feed at summer’s end,
preparing for migration.

 

 

Sue Norton has had poems published in various magazines and anthologies.

Peter Leight

There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .

Ansuya Patel

Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.

Abiodun Salako

a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.

                                                                                                                                       i am building him a morgue
                                                                                                                                                       for Thanksgiving.