Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gabrielle Meadows
On sunday morning you lay together laughing
She gets into your bed
like when she was little.
Flowers grow out of the wardrobe,
moss claims the windowsill
and a vine
snakes its way to the bed post,
climbing.
You are laughing.
Imagine she is bounding
from the garden,
skin laced with sweat.
Smells of pollen and soil.
Imagine you need to get up but don’t yet.
Five more minutes.
This is all there is
and all there ever is.
The moss claims the windowsill
and every inch of earth.
Gabrielle Meadows lives in Norfolk and works in arts education. She runs workshops in drama and improvisation. Previous publications in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Atrium Poetry and The Lake. @gabrielle_meadows
Hongwei Bao
Every five minutes it does its job,
hoovers every inch of her memory,
declutters all pains and sorrows.
Gary Day
And once the father frowned
As the boy struggled to fasten
The drawbridge on his fort.
‘He’ll never be any good
With his hands’ he declared,
As if the boy wasn’t there.
Royal Rhodes
Perhaps the friends of Lazarus, who died
and slipped his shroud, on seeing him might swoon
or rush to hear the tales of that beyond
they hoped and feared to face.
Dmitry Blizniuk for World Poetry Day
God in his worn, greasy jeans like a car mechanic
is lighting a new life from an old one.
Jeff Skinner
It takes ages. Tell me what it is you’re after
she says, when finally I get through.
Annabelle Markwick-Staff
I devoured the Olympics, filled my mouth
and scrapbook with sticky ephemera.
Charles G. Lauder
beneath night’s skin he unearths raw stones
serrated encrusted enigmatic cold
Arlo Kean
we are at a cafe just round
the corner from hampstead
heath & sipping berry sunrise
Paul Stephenson
Goya was an octopus that smelt of funerals on Mondays.
Sundays, the scent of getting ready.