Today’s choice
Previous poems
Regina Weinert
Nothing much
It was the snatch of a dream,
someone said this is not
what you do in the desert,
it was one precise thing, not a list,
and I had to find my way back to it.
They always ask you now, don’t they,
to remember how it felt.
I only heard the words, had no idea
how they matched what I’d done,
something like opening
a door or a window
in a stopped car. I’m practised, so
on waking I saw a British army lorry
on a German country road heading
west. That’s all, because
I don’t go into confined spaces
if I can help it. I’ve learnt not to
from my mother, and to be grateful
for the right Jack and Jock,
Cadbury’s chocolate, understatement.
Regina Weinert grew up in Hamburg, then lived in Edinburgh for many years and now lives in Sheffield. Her poems appear in magazines, e.g. The North, Pennine Platform, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand, Under the Radar and The Friday Poem.
Bill Greenwell
Out Of Bounds The sweet shop, for starters. Dabs, dibs, Creamola Foam, anything with a fizz. The maids upstairs in their own dormitory, who passed us a copy of Modern Sunbathing. Travelling too far beyond the cricket pavilion, where temptation...
Helen Evans
The calling You’re sitting in the half-light, in a cavern scoured from limestone, on a boulder by an underground stream. Behind: a dark tunnel, too narrow to crawl through, where water flows from, cool and clear. Ahead: heaped debris, the walls of...
Rosie Hadden
The sisters of stone wend their way in a line one after another the sisters of stone walk across the hollow lake quieten their legs on the dry drowned bridge listening they prayer their fingertips around the cupped whim stones that hold neither...
John Grey
Proposal Oh yes, I can still rise with the best of them, sink with the worst. I can play my violin outside your door as easily as spit on your roses. How would you like your jazz? Perfectly syncopated or horribly atonal? I got the sun in the...
Susan Castillo Street
Arpeggio I lie awake. Night presses down my eyes. A blackbird’s song scythes through the gloom, its silver corkscrew ripple reminding me the days are longer now. Susan Castillo Street is Harriet Beecher Stowe Professor Emerita,...
Jennifer A. McGowan
The Fisherman King A man who lived alone worked in the city. One day, as he left the building, he heard a kkss underfoot. He looked down. He’d stepped on a crisp.. He sniffed. Cheese and onion. He ignored it and walked on. As he left the coffee...
Salil Chaturvedi
Pink Legs I want to be a bird she says Which one? I don’t know A small one With a strong voice One that likes to sing on summer afternoons Long nostalgic notes No, a single long nostalgic note, like sweeeeeeeeeeee That ends in a question...
William Doreski
Getting Away with It In the hardware store you tuck a chainsaw under your shirt and walk out grinning like a grill. In the pharmacy you glom handfuls of expensive pills and pocket them. In the bookstore you stand and read a book right through and...
Robert Nisbet
The Gamekeeper’s Son Unfortunately, Julian, you’ve missed the First World War. His history teacher, Mr. Perks, owlish, gentle, self-contained, welcomes him back from his illness. The boy’s attention has to leap from Sarajevo to the armistice. But...