Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rongili Biswas
Rosary peas
Girls under the tree,
one with hands clasped as in worship,
the others picking
the scarlet fallen seeds,
so they could string them,
those necklace beads.
They’ve played this game
since sun-up, and even now,
all through this windswept day,
rosary peas fall to their feet,
waiting quietly
to be gathered
and picked and gathered again
for a stringing
that will never end.
Rongili Biswas, a bilingual writer and musician from Kolkata, India, writes across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her work, published in journals and magazines internationally, explores memory, observation, and the rhythms of daily life. She has received multiple literary awards.
Jean O’Brien
Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted,
birds peck with blunted beaks,
pushing up are the blind green pods
of what will soon be yellow daffodils,
given light and air.
Jean Atkin
We scoured the parish tip most weeks, when we were kids.
We clambered it in wellies. Ferals, we scavenged
in the debris of the adults’ lives.
Sally Festing
Life lines still arc round the base of each thumb
though the bulk of hand’s muscle mass
Joe Crocker
There was always, of course, the cold
– its freezing pretty fingerprints on our side of the pane.
Julie Sheridan
They married in a chapel of black steel
bars, tethered up their feathers to serve as
stained glass. . .
Maxine Sibihwana
here, water does not run. instead it
sits obediently in old plastic containers
Lesley Curwen
Her feet snagged in a cleverly-placed net
my sister waits for him to untangle her,
to hold her head still between thick fingers . . .
From the Archives: In Memory of Jean Cardy
Denizens Mice live in the London Tube. A train leaves and small pieces of sooty black detach themselves from the sooty black walls and forage for crumbs in the rubbish under the rails that are death to man. You can’t see their feet move. They...
Tina Cole
Mr. Pig modelling his best Sunday suit of farmyard smells,
flees from the cook’s cleaver to find himself a sow.