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.
Cindy Botha
atlas bear
black-footed ferret
cape lion
Jasmine Gibbs
This morning – Blackstar,
Bowie, those jazz swan songs
sputtering from the CD player,
wild trumpets that convulse
through negative space
Jane Pearn
the pool holds my face
my breath
ripples the water
Robin Lindsay Wilson
The single crimson rose
she wears in her lapel,
to test his imperfections,
draws him into detail
Ian Hickey
When the half-light drops below the horizon
the birth of darkness comes
Rose Lennard
My mother died seven years ago, but last night
she had a message for me. The mechanics
are irrelevant, what she gave stays with me
Rongili Biswas
Girls under the tree,
one with hands clasped as in worship,
the others picking
the scarlet fallen seeds
Laura Sheahen
What is the ancient curse they know that you don’t
Moving along their mouth-lines and their eyebrows
Lowering their lids, tensing their nods or shrugs
Marilyn Ricci
After his baby son died he strapped
a tumble dryer to his back and ran
the roads around the village.