Today’s choice

Previous poems

Sally Festing

 

 

 

A Basket of Nettles and Larks

Life lines still arc round the base of each thumb
though the bulk of hand’s muscle mass
lies in the thenar bellies, now flat as linoleum

and tendons smart branches when I brace fingers,
interrupting hillocks of skin.

The heart line runs under my wedding ring,
fused to the engagement ring (one college afternoon).

If I massage the mudflats in this wicked pack of cards,
flies swarm its spiderwebs. But valiantly my head line tramps
through my palm’s basket of nettles and larks.

 

 

Sally Festing’s new poetry collection, Meeting Places (Mica Press), will be launched 22 May 2025 (6-8.00pm) at Norwich’s Maddermarket Bar. The poems wrap up love, blood ties, art, and aging in a spikey bundle. She’s a seasoned North Norfolk author (https://www.sallyfesting.info).

Gareth Writer Davies

      Gilestone Standing Stone the map tells me not much (there are so many megaliths hereabouts) on the point of giving up there it is three metres tall girthy like a pollarded oak its reason now lost in depopulation maybe it was erected here for its...

B. Anne Adriaens

      A child’s coat There’s tiny me on a strip of concrete. There’s the tiny coat I’m wearing, fluffy white: the brightest spot in the image, this coat my mother says she loved, this coat my mother says was so well made, a gift from someone who had...

Pat Edwards

      Speaking in code I once heard a man speak in tongues, just sounds like words, but not words. He told us he was filled with the spirit. I once heard remuterations in the air, cirvivulating on the breeze, uncanny in their lisonulance; breathless...

Sophie Diver

      Ghost, Moth They want you out of this House of forgotten tea in which you are floating Like a calcium slip This house in which you yield As a sweep of onion skin In old dishwater Disgusted by yourself hollowed out In the flesh of an armchair An...

Oliver Comins

      On the Hill No-one has seen me outside the bungalow. I am a rumour behind windows that reflect the sky and reveal nothing of an indoor life. I could pretend there is an extensive lawn in front of me, leading down a gentle slope to a pleached hedge...

Emma Jones

      Autumn A sea of firecrackers on spindly fingertips. The wind sails through harmonious foundations. A thunderclap, a secondment of wings, embossed leaves fall like burning fossils. It's the hour for nightingales.     Emma Jones is a...

Jane Ayres

      muted tethered i let her touch me without touching me (tears before bedtime) but (listening to the deep ache keeping the things that hurt close closed making space for kinder smotherings) i could never tell you friendship isn’t a consolation prize...

JP Seabright

      Do you remember how we danced in the dark, the sky was still, the earth was breathing. After the guests left, after the wake, you stayed, and we stood close but not quite touching, until you took my arms and we swayed in time with the music of the...