Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rhian Thomas
How to write a poem about a mountain
On the ridge we stop to catch ourselves, leaning
against crags to view the drop. You tell me how you envy
my sweeping vistas, my heritage of paths that cut
clean through wind. I shush your maundering
and press on before the light collapses. ’I spend my days,’
I say, ‘In the biblical shadow of this thing. Don’t ask me
to tell its shape. I have no stomach for scale.
The mountain sorts me like moraine, the paths
are all eroded into platitude and there are faults,
always threatening tremors. I am dizzy
from its wind systems, scoured thin by cloud.’
I leave a silence billowing. Further down,
I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks
like a worn out song. Slipped in my pocket
it still insists, indents soft flesh. I walk on
muttering. My stride is good. If I keep going
the retort might accumulate some mass.
Rhian Thomas grew up in North Wales and now lives in Gloucestershire. Her work has been published by Honno, Planet, Poetry Wales and Steel Jackdaw. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Laurie Lee Prize.
Benedicta Norell
Questions
We were always in the car that year the price of having a nice house in a nice area get in get
in it’s time to go where are we going our friends the supermarket the cinema the mall just for
a drive between banks of jaded shovelled snow
Kathy Pimlott
It’s impossible to foretell what will provoke tears, the sort
that well up and tip over while you hold onto the kitchen sink
waiting for them to subside…
Ali Murphy
Mean sister We are stuck in our own words, not hearing each other. Sixty-somethings, we may as well be six, throwing sticks down the beck or poking dolls eyes out of their sockets, scribbling on their perfect faces. We are well rehearsed, know our cues,...
Bruach Mhor
I heard a calm, clear voice.
But not with my ears. Not my outward ears.
It wasn’t madness…
Moira Garland
tall as the absentee house.
How the girl moored her hands and heart charmed by riven bark…
Maureen Jivani
I dream I’m at the hospital
massaging your feet, your tiny feet
that I have freed from their tight
white stockings…
Jayant Kashyap
We are in the bath, your hands
around my back, mine around yours—
everything covered in a fog.
Jane Holland
When fog falls over Rough Tor,
the world creaks
on the end of a string…
Emma Lee
Snow’s Reset The roofs blend with the snow-laden clouds, borders softened so it’s only memory that differentiates my space from my neighbour’s. The wet smell confuses pets whose footprints meander over territorial edges, leave crazed patterns like...