Today’s choice
Previous poems
Patricia Minson
Wood Anemone
Between the trees dust shifts,
light fractures like a prism.
A cathedral silence greens the air.
The soil smells of damp books.
I see them — paper-thin,
spreading on the dark floor of the wood.
Still as a shut door.
Nothing moves —
not the nettles,
not even a rumour
of someone once there.
A nudge of wind tips
each flower cup.
They twitch, then settle …
like sleeves lined with lullabies.
White flicker. Then nothing.
No miracle. No change.
Just wind.
Just petals.
Just the usual business of vanishing —
a dry kind of wanting.
Patricia Minson is a writer and poet based in West Cornwall. Her work explores themes of inheritance, grief, and class, blending domestic detail with lyrical intensity. She was placed third in the 2025 Crysse Morrision Poetry Prize (Frome Festival), Highly Commended in the 2025 Wirral Poetry Festival Open Competition, and had two poems Commended in the 2025 South Downs Poetry Competiton.
Emily Veal
boudicca you’re a brewery down the road i drank a bottle of your finest on the train back from bury st edmunds the red queen (no one will call you ginger) i see you everywhere realised you were also the wetherspoons round the corner the one with...
Lesley Burt
tongue it various from burr to babel swish to swirl
rushes between buttresses plaits threads of currents
where swans lord-and-lady-it along the centre
trips over own flow with
fish-out-of-water flash salmon’s silver high-jump
Sam Szanto
This love was. Slowly it becomes formless,
drifting, softening, snakeskin-empty,
the part it has played in who I am now
secreted in a pocket of a coat
Ma Yongbo 马永波 and Helen Pletts on World Poetry Day
When you enter mountains, afternoons stretch
and lengthen like days; mesmerise.
下午进山的人都会多活上一天
他们从这山望着更高的山
搓着通红的大手望山气变化
Bel Wallace
Trespasses Forgive me The E flat on your baby grand (not quite in tune). This same finger in the crack that goes clean through the bungalow’s supporting wall. Then flicking dust from the fringed edge of your floral lampshade. Noticing that they...
Arlette Manasseh
You were the pine, softening the dirt I grew up in: the one I climbed in the breeze. Wanting to describe you, I had called you Paulie. That is not your name.
Lynn Valentine
A Bad Spell
The rowan by the house is cracked in two,
her bark ragged, grown good-for-nothing old.
Matt Nicholson
Cousin
I didn’t know who the call was about,
just that it was past my proper bedtime
Karen Hodgson Pryce
All at sea on a serenity of sheep,
we played monopoly, box tatty and frail.
Its missing chance cards, no get-out-of-jail.