Today’s choice

Previous poems

Roger Robinson

 

 

 

Pipeline

We walk from cane fields,
cotton in our nightshirts, sweet
sugar on our teeth.

My peoples chant strong magic.
My peoples beatbox in jail.

 

 

Roger Robinson won the T.S. Eliot Prize (2019), the RSL Ondaatje Prize (2020), the Cholmondeley Award (2024). He is a Royal Society of Literature Fellow and has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, and the European Prize for Freedom.

His collection A Portable Paradise was named a New Statesman Book of the Year. His book Home Is Not a Place, created in collaboration with Johny Pitts, was a Guardian Poetry Book of the Year and shortlisted for the British Book Awards. Insta: @rogerrobinsononline Website: rogerrobinsononline.com

Nigel King

My compass – its needle set with a sliver of blue stone – spins and spins. Breath mists my snow
goggles. I wipe them endlessly. Even in these thick seal-skin mitts my hands are frozen. I have been
no place as still as this.

Gail Webb

He cuts. I lie still, teach myself
to dream of St David’s Bay,
seaweed strewn on incoming tides,
surfers slice big waves in half.

Elizabeth Wilson Davies

There are places in Wales I don’t go: reservoirs that are the subconscious of a people – R S Thomas

Cofiwch Dryweryn, that two-word protest,
white on blood-red background, landscaped in green,

Kay Feneley

Some days I must immerse myself in the waters
These days are more than others

Monday 09.06 – a sewage overflow has activated