Today’s choice

Previous poems

Jasmine Gibbs

 

 

 

Messages, Signs, Codes

This morning – Blackstar,
Bowie, those jazz swan songs
sputtering from the CD player,
wild trumpets that convulse
through negative space. Funny,
coincidences like that; awoke
to a bonewrong feeling,
my senses pricked like
antennae cosmically tuned.
Tried not to believe them:
messages, signs, codes –
but then the news            Kim
effervescent, ephemeral,
a supernova burned out
in a hospice, long knelled
but refusing The End
as foretold, far too busy
to die, far too gorgeous.

And then I am back
at my shelf, dusting a finger
over cased spines, lingering
at those dark auto-eulogies
by accident? By chance?
watching blackthorns spurt
their nectared nebulae,
crocuses, tulips, daffodils
holding out against the late
frost, a warble of robins
fluttering from the tarmac
like tiny Houdinis only
just escaping the killing
crunch of wheels,
whilst I exhale
smoke signals from out
my kitchen window.

 

 

 

Jasmine Gibbs is a poet from Great Yarmouth. Her work can be found in The London Magazine, And Other Poems, Gutter, and Ambient Receiver.

Simon Williams

What were these fairies called
before we knew of hummingbirds?
Bumblebee moth because of the size?
Reed-nose moth because of the proboscis?

Daniel Sluman

just as the night sky shifts
beyond the minds

of the animals outside

the ceilings
we are pressed beneath change

in aspect & colour

Farah Ali

Notes from nature on how to survive this:
 
1. Learn crypsis and mimesis be a gecko or a mossy frog
 
2. Method actors sway like dead-leaf mantises on branches