Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kate Bailey
Us and Them
They’ve mended the park fence again,
patched it over with the usual ugly metalwork,
like a riot barricade.
That’ll keep them out –
the delinquents,
the ne’er-do-wells,
who break in and sit on the grass in the dark
and watch the moon,
the dirty buggers!
Next week it will be prised away
to leave a gap the width of a person.
Another incursion.
And those scum-of-the-earth
lying under softly budding trees,
counting the stars.
Kate Bailey is a violinist, but she has always loved words. She has two grown-up daughters, and lives in Oxford with her husband and pacifist cat. Her writing has been published in the Frogmore Papers and the Fish anthology.
Mymona Bibi for Day One of our Archive Feature
corners folded
edges worn.
where girls in
the night’s meski
giggle in secret
hair in tangles.
Catherine O’Brien
When all is quiet save for the silky rustling of an autumn breeze
let that love show.
When your patience is darkness-dappled and as weary as an exhausted scholar
let that love show.
Marianne Habeshaw
session in the woods. Someone took a feather
to the hairdressers. Gum cross-sectioned
my cheek; he forgot about removal to kiss.
Had to avoid tree roots, placed us on green.
He mentioned his bullied niece kept reaching
for her blanket; Mr. Smith is quaking regression,
Fergal O’Dwyer
but sunlight streaming in
through impractically curtainless windows;
my skin, made-up in golden light,
looking taught from affluence
and vitamins.
Like they do in films,
Hattie Graham
wait for the witch who comes to pick wild garlic.
Together we can be brave and
pull the green bits from her teeth.
Wandering the glen with
nothing in our pockets, we can search
for the place where fairies still live.
No one will find us there,
not even the old grey bell they ring at tea time.
George Parker
I make broth, feel odd wiping it off your face
moments after swiping through bodies, preferences,
dates. Sunset-orange forget-me-nots mar the napkin cloth
Nicolas Spicer
Paysage Moralisé
There’s more to this three-foot square:
lilac vetch & vermilion
field-poppies, some sort of crucifer . . .
Luke Bateman
Brown limpets with tonsured heads
creeping over the fish-stink isle,
spongy underfoot, seaweed for grass.
Adam Horovitz
Such stillness in the air. The attic window
is a cupped ear set to alert the house to subtle
shifts in atmosphere: auguries; signs; any tiny
notice of cataclysmic change. . .