Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tim Dwyer
Shedding
Annamakerrig
It begins high up
the chestnut tree
with leaves on the twigs
on the tips of branches
where sap has slowed.
Turning amber
carried by the breeze
they touch the earth,
rest on the grass
where autumn begins
Tim Dwyer’s Accepting The Call has won the Straid Collection Award and is nominated for the Forward Best First Collection. He is a previous contributor to IS&T. He lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland.
Elizabeth Osmond
Difficult doctors don’t care about their patients,
They are filling up hospitals and GP practices with their difficult bodies.
They are often late to work and shuffle into handover . . .
Jay Whittaker
. . . .We would go
to the cupboard where multi-packs
of Fine Fare’s basic crisps were sorted
into old shoe boxes, one for each child.
Kate Maxwell
I’d rather be inside
pretending I’m not
pretending commentary
inside my head
is real and here
Jim Murdoch
Some things we hold in trust,
some we forget we even own
and then there’re those items
we hang onto “just in case.”
Andrew McDonnell on Father’s Day
Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...
Anna Lewis
With the neon-splashed night at the window
I counted each contraction down, obediently,
as my mother had told me to do.
Bobbie Sparrow
You ask me why
I put myself through that,
as if I jumped out of a plane
14,000 feet of fear and longing.
Chris Rice
You wake up (so you tell me)
to the lurid gold of summer
splashed like paint across
your tea-brown walls
Karin Molde
Fortuna rolls the dice in Tumahole Free State, South Africa I have never seen a baby so tiny outside a womb. You hold her jigsaw of bones in a blanket, afraid to scatter the pieces in case they’d sail like seeds onto the road. A dung beetle rolls...