Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kathleen Gray
Liberty
When she asked what I wanted
to be when I grew up, my mother
laughed when I said ‘free’
She’s been dead for more than
thirty years – not much freedom
in her kitchen-sink life
She settled for snatching time out,
pausing with that dreamy look,
that secret smile,
knife in one hand, half-scraped
carrot for Thursday’s soup
in the other, oblivious
to me spying from the kitchen
door, wondering where she
escaped to and if one day
she’d decide to take off
her apron, leave us free to
cook our own soup.
Kathleen Gray is Scottish by birth, French by adoption. Her poems have been published in various literary magazines, including New Feathers, Drawn to the Light, The Alchemy Spoon, London Grip, Poetry Scotland and Causeway. She lives in Paris
Chalice Am Bergris
It is not like an egg cracking
or an exquisite shiver of shattered glass.
Piers Haben
When I lost loved ones last year
I thought my childhood fears would return.
Lesley Burt
There’s a house in a suburb of between-the-wars pebble-dash & bay windows, where the soundtrack is sighs, tuts & bellows, the clash of plates & jangle of cutlery.
Gabrielle Meadows
She gets into your bed
like when she was little.
Flowers grow out of the wardrobe,
moss claims the windowsill
Alice Huntley
I had a leaf in my hair when I arrived
the receptionist thought it was a hairclip
Gemma Blakeley
My Dad Complains That The Hedges Are Overgrown
and the word bemuses me, implying as it does
the concept of excess in what can only be good.
Nick Cooke
Molluscous receivers, would that you could
turn your talents inwards, and pick up
all that goes on in the cerebral swamp . . .
Luke Moran
There’s a
flash of colour
from the hedge.
Cáit O’Neill McCullagh
And when you step into the clearing
there will be dancing. The unsteady moon, shaken
to ribbon; shimmering through regalia of clouds.