Today’s choice
Previous poems
Mike Duggan
The Stirrups Of Genghis Khan
A decapitated road sign
Spears the yellow verge,
Meaningless as a symbol
Of progress. A vain strut.
The bus driver’s hands are folded
As the stop approaches.
From the fields,
An algorithm of hooves enters the ears
Of yawning school children.
More is known than ever before.
The day doubles over, winded
And as language must
Death moves
A little off, as if uncertain.
Mike Duggan is a fifty year old poet from London. His work has appeared over time in The Rialto, Magma, Tears In The Fence and Perverse. He has a new poem forthcoming in The Rialto 104 and his pamphlet Masquerade was recently shortlisted by the Dithering Chaps press.
Anne Donnellan
I prayed for resurrection
that the sun in the sky
might dance Easter morning.
Philip Gross
Enough of scorch, scald, sore- and rawness.
Sometimes flesh longs for eclipse.
Nick Allen
she told me about the still hours
spent at the coast watching the east
Phil Vernon
Because we were four
and I only had strength to carry one
and knew no other way
I carried the one who called out loudest;
threatened us most.
Patrick Deeley
As you rummage of a morning
among dust-furred personal effects
jumbled in an old
wooden suitcase under a bed . . .
Terry Jones
The Lake District Tourist Board
has had no input into what
you are now reading, but I so
miss Cumbria in Holy Week
Mary Mulholland
Who will pick the apples now she’s gone?
Samantha Carr
She has few secrets with her translucent map skin of blue underground rivers visible to scale.
Alison Patrick
A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters . . .