Today’s choice
Previous poems
Chris Hardy
Memento Vivere
We lived here once.
The rain we heard
fell everywhere.
Silence except the wind
across the ground.
It’s best to keep quiet.
Words are like dead seeds,
they vanish when they’re said.
*
New Year’s Eve
without stars or moon.
I believe they are there
in their own light.
Faith goes deeper
than knowledge.
It is dawn for any soul awake
around the farthest star.
*
Sometimes if you can find it
life is worth the work.
The future’s always young,
we get younger by the minute.
Here and now goes quickly,
where is it?
Soon instead of moving away
the horizon will turn back
and pull the sky down like a lid.
Remember to live.
Chris Hardy has lived and travelled all over the world and is now in Sussex. His poems have won prizes and been widely published. His last collection, Key to the Highway, was published by Shoestring Press.
Paul Stephenson
Goya was an octopus that smelt of funerals on Mondays.
Sundays, the scent of getting ready.
Jessica Mookherjee for International Women’s Day
The pain comes plucked from a field
in a garland of sunlight.
Jenny Pagdin for International Women’s Day
After many moons
I am perhaps readying to speak.
Kate Noakes for International Women’s Day
Each year in March, on the eighth day,
the one we’re allowed to call ours,
slowly, Jess reads our names . . .
Julia Webb for International Women’s Day
hoover witch mum / mum on the rocks / mum’s coach horses / all the king’s mums /
Sue Burge for International Women’s Day
speaks whale, speaks star
breathes in — tight as a tomb
breathes out — splintered crackle
Gill Connors for International Women’s Day
Rack and stretch her, loosen flesh
from bone. A jointed bird will not squawk.
Helen Ivory for International Women’s Day
A woman somewhere is typing on the internet
my heart wakes me up like clockwork.
Hélène Demetriades
At breakfast my man sticks a purple
magnolia bud in my soft boiled egg.
The flower opens, distilling to lilac.