Today’s choice
Previous poems
Anthony Lawrence
Gathering Mushrooms in the Shadow of a Barn
One had a ball of water that magnified the word shiver
on its cap, and one had been torn and thrown
against the wood, a soft bomb, leaving gills and skin.
I knew enough to give them names and say the words
primordium and veil in the manner of my neighbour
who can find mushrooms blindfolded. The smell,
she says, when you’re downwind, is earth as invitation,
earth made vertical with lit stems. My fingers flecked
with spores, the knees of my jeans dark from over-
night rain, I arranged them cap-to-stipe in lines.
In the barn, at a table, my knife gleamed in a band
of afternoon sun. Agaricus campestris, I said,
and a crow leaned from a rafter to listen.
Anthony Lawrence has published nineteen collections of poetry and a novel. His books and individual poems have won a number of awards, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Ginkgo Prize for Eco poetry, the Gregory O’Donohue Poetry prize and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. He lives on Moreton Bay, Queensland.
Poetry from Gurmeet Kaur, UEA’s Birch Family Scholar 2025/2026
I kill lines of ant. Heat arrives
in the wrong season. It feels important
to know the names of birds under
the thrum of a flight corridor.
Sarah Nathan
The ash that screams into the night,
the lake that dries, the child amongst the rubble,
the heat, the fire, the lack of books,
Anna Bowles
Akademichna Street
is bombed-out flats, is
the hot-pink Sweet Bakery Café, is
straggly new-planted trees, is
Philip Athans
Never shows up late to a single thing he’s invited to
Always brings the most thoughtful and carefully curated and perfect gift
Never shows up early and never once overstays his welcome
Always appears well groomed and clean and appropriately dressed
Michelle Diaz
This is just a woman,
sticking her life back together
after years spent recovering.
Autumn Richardson
What you are –
bodied light, a store of oil
a hive of warm blood
Rebecca Parfitt
In the back of the taxi on my way to the hospital,
thighs clenched together,
the driver asked me,
Samarth Agarwal
Here — in the absolute zero of space — fireworks!
Look how the crucibles of creation,
those million coloured fingers that stretch light years —
Jenny Scoones
We unlearn how it felt to touch
And resume our separate days in shirts and trousers,
Like hazmats against the sun and its longing,
The moon with its underbelly pulls.