Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gareth Writer-Davies
In the Dales
after John Ashbery
it’s a special kind of empty
the footed earth, saluting the sky
so much to see
I took a photograph of you
posed in the window seat
punchy red slippers
blurring rock and field
the same window in five years?
jenny wren says yes, the crows caw no
what do they know
as days go by
certain details are already hazy
and new succeeds new
as we spread over the vast stone barns
of Swale and Wensley
and there we are, older certainly
walking to the monument
where there is no monument
the upper left corner of the sky
a history of what might have been
Gareth Writer-Davies: Hawthornden Fellow (2019). Shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2014 and 2017) and the Erbacce Prize (2014). Commended in the Prole Laureate Competition (2015) and Prole Laureate for 2017. Commended in the Welsh Poetry Competition (2015) and Highly Commended in 2011. His pamphlet Bodies was published in 2015 followed by Cry Baby in 2017, The Lover’s Pinch in 2018, The End in 2019 and Wysg in 2022.
Gopal Lahiri
From this far-side apartment
you watch jarul leaves darkening with the seasons
Adam Kelly
Determined, you smash against the window
I have to admire you in your striped suit
Sandra Noel
The sea happens to me today
not because I’m the woman in the bakers
brusque turned rude
or the peaches still hard in the bowl
Grace Lynn
Sunlight saunters in long, thin wires through the fallow field
of my bedroom. You approach, a migrating heron
in a runny yolk collar and suntanned shorts, a white-light emissary
of hope. . .
Miriam Swales
I’m waiting for news I don’t want to talk about
and scrolling through old photos to escape.
After some swipes, I see you walking away.
Chris Hardy
The night before we left we smoked opium
for the first time and didn’t sleep.
Angela France
Perhaps some small creature fallen
from where it should be. I am unsure
whether I saw it move.
Adam Horovitz
We cannot update you yet, other than to say we are caught
in a doldrums between stations and that your father can wait
as he has been waiting these past two years . . .
Sue Spiers
A woodpigeon calls
his five-note matins.
Petals ratchet wide
as the sun rises.