Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Tabula Rasa
Rectangular, with corners cut off like an octagon, muddy brown shows through the cream exterior where the edges are chipped. Just the right height for a young child learning to stand. Coloured beakers stacked up ready to be knocked down. A place for card games played at speed, endless cups of tea. Smooth and squat, immovable, it has borne the weight of decades, silent witness to family life, a slab too heavy to lift up.
Sue Wallace-Shaddad’s pamphlets are: Once There Was Colour, (Palewell Press, 2024), Sleeping Under Clouds (Clayhanger Press, 2023), A City Waking Up (Dempsey and Windle, 2020). Widely published, Sue does readings, writes poetry reviews and runs workshops suewallaceshaddad.wordpress.com
Brian Kirk
The train is the way,
the tracks a scar cut
deep in the land
you can’t help but touch.
Michelle Diaz
Mum was
a raised axe and a party hat.
Alice O’Malley-Woods
i run like a goat
tongue-lolled
Caiti Luckhurst
But first the sun has to break in two
Mara Adamitz Scrupe
on that new broke land I don’t anymore
recall there may have been a tree line or a hedgerow
a grove named & a bird’s sternum
George Sandifer-Smith
Spring 1833 – mists folding their sheets in the fields.
Isaac Roberts feels the turned earth, his father’s
farm an island in the hurtling Milky Way –
Sharon Phillips
Wet tarmac blinks red and gold,
names shine outside the Gaumont.
‘Stop dreaming, you’ll get lost.’
Bill Greenwell
Before the first turn of the key, before
adjusting the mirror, before releasing the handbrake even,
Dad said: there are two things you need to know.
Matt Gilbert
Alive, but not exactly,
as it fills the frame, flicker-lit
by lightning. . .