Today’s choice
Previous poems
Katherine Duffy
Wake
(Leaving Amorgos, Greece)
The ferry pushes the sea,
forces a long, white reply
that speaks of where we’ve been –
a hulk of rock, a prison
in the time of the Colonels,
now a place of painted chairs,
fairy lights. I lean over,
try to read the disarranged water,
the sea in dark mode.
I count the times we’ve
come and gone. More
behind us now than before.
We sail on, past other islands
brothers gently sleeping.
The white scroll
reaches back,
undoes itself.
Katherine Duffy lives in Dublin. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Crannóg, The Interpreter’s House, etc. She has published collections with The Dedalus Press (Ireland) and in 2018 a pamphlet with Templar Poetry.
On the first day of Christmas, we bring you Hannah Linden, John White and Stephen Keeler
. . . Now the villages is
en fête: dressed for a party in the dark,
across the fields, along uneven paths . . .
Anna Chorlton
She curled emerald
tights about the core of
an oak
slumbering with thick bare
limbs.
John Greening
On Stage in a home-made model theatre, c.1967 Glued to your block, in paint and ink you wait for Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life to stop. Smell of hardboard and hot bakelite. The lino curtain’s ready to go up. At which, the straightened coat hanger is shoved and on you...
Anna Bowles
Nothing bad can happen on a plane.
Engine fires, earache, hijackers; but no new grief.
Kirsty Fox
Winged Kirsty Fox is a writer and artist specialising in ecopoetics. She writes lyric essays and poetry, and has had work published by Apricot Press, Arachne Press, and Streetcake Magazine. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently studying...
Jason Ryberg
Sometimes I’d swear that
the ancient box fan I’ve hauled
around with me for
years is a receiver for
the conversations of ghosts
Peter Wallis
Dead in a chest,
are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.
Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
always Third week in August
Amanda Bell
We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims
Anna Maughan
Illness had left me
brittle as frost, icicle-thin
swaddled in borrowed warmth