Today’s choice
Previous poems
David Lukens
Samaras
Having earned their wings through evolution
it is almost as though they are loth to use them
preferring familiar earth, the old tree’s broad shadow.
Everywhere you look these whips of sycamore, living
where they fell, rooting out some well of nourishment
in a wall, a bed, a yoghurt pot of rotting leaves.
And so many of them! Impossible to count their bristling ranks
like massed souls grumbling on the banks of Lethe
jostling to be noticed as the fates allot each life.
Was there a single moment — when the air darkened,
and down they span like fallen angels, a forest
carried within their collective spinning wings?
I do my bit, kneeling to uproot individual stems
while the tits turn cartwheels in the old tree’s limbs.
I know this is no more or less than they expect.
Underground, a widening web of roots
is slowly moulding faith from darkness
settling itself for the rise and fall of years.
David Lukens lives in Wiltshire. His work has been published in magazines such as Acumen, Butcher’s Dog and Under the Radar. His pamphlet One Brief Wave won the Cheltenham Poetry Festival’s first pamphlet competition and was published in 2021
Aardhra Chandran
Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.
Jason Lovell
While children kneel at your cage in awe
edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit,
curse words into your magnificent beak,
mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet
Elijah MacBean
My Name is My Name Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam – it always had to be Samina. She said she’d rather be waterboarded than let her daughter be whitewashed by whites too conservative to spare the extra syllables. Ami never let anyone call...
Damen O’Brien
The coastline’s smile is sharp with blackened teeth,
seabird shelters, scarps, cutaways, broken reefs:
the bloody mouth of a boxer who can’t be dropped,
punch drunk with the brain’s purple pounding . . .
Gwil James Thomas
Terrestrial locomotion
across concrete,
the inverted pendulum,
moving flesh and boot –
Royal Rhodes
The passenger train along the Connecticut shoreline moves as if in a
river of wooden ties and steel rails. . .
Neil Elder
There are blackbirds singing beautifully at dawn,
Mozart and Shakespeare existed and that’s fine . . .
Abegail Morley
Tonight, my houseplant child asks about sunlight,
brushes my arm as she stutters on the word,
photosynthesis . . .
Kathleen Gray
When she asked what I wanted
to be when I grew up, my mother
laughed when I said ‘free’