Today’s choice

Previous poems

Sue Norton

 

 

 

Summer’s End

Today I tipped the packet of coffee
into the cafetiere instead of the tin.
Caught myself in time, didn’t pour water in.

I’ve started to write notes to myself:
Shut bathroom window. Lock back door.
Yesterday at the bank I couldn’t remember

mini statement but I can recognise
this orange blur, this hover of wings
above abelia grandiflora, a hummingbird

hawk moth exploring the tube-flowers
with its long tongue. I sip my coffee.
Old age comes tapping up my garden path

on unsteady feet, but I’m content to watch
a flycatcher flitting up and back, up
and back to its perch on the fence post,

the hawk moth probing
trumpet by trumpet as it siphons
nectar’s last drops,

the flycatcher fluttering up to snatch
one more feed at summer’s end,
preparing for migration.

 

 

Sue Norton has had poems published in various magazines and anthologies.

Sylvia Banham

Pigeons have invaded the garden, two then four, then a flock.
They roost in the apple tree to nest, reconnoitre or mate
 
ignore my sorties to deter them and shit without stint
on patio and herb bed, foul lovely hyssop and thyme.

Gordon Vells

Impotent in family life and ineffectual at work,
sometimes he would spend a full quarter-hour
just circulating the mini-roundabout on his moped,
dizzy from the power of blocking everyone else.

Patrick Wright

i protest     say how when i’m gone i’d like to rest before the choice to return & go through 
all this again     you sigh as though that’s absurd & endings are just endings     we’re mulch 
& nothing but endless fucking 

Francis de Lima

Oh London. U useless city. Map to

                                                                        nowhere land. Tight stretch 

                                                                        open eye. The underground metal. 

The night tube. The railway. Smog

Over coaltrip. The presence

                                                                          Of machine upon machine. U

Miriam Swales

When I was 12, I knew the weight of a human head.
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (a bit of dark comedy).
It grew from there. The curiosity. The calculations.