Today’s choice
Previous poems
Eugene O’Hare
In Memory of Anne
It hasn’t been this bright all year –
the moon’s white scalp, spot-lit,
a head turned away from a thing
the rest of us fear: unearthly dark
and its stars – the small unfindable
glass in a vast unwalkable carpet.
Night is where more things hide
than dare to appear. Except behind
closed eyes, here new worlds realise;
less-ordered, sculpted from twisted
timelines, reared as if out of a sleeping sea;
waves to keep the sleeper from wakeful thought.
So when the priest said she died
at home in her sleep, I replied Too vague
demanding to know during which
dream she was caught. Was she mid-chase –
half-dressed in a colour she’d never wear?
Already talking to the dead?
Or something more of our world, perhaps –
like changing the bed, reversing the car,
washing the step some Summer afternoon,
peeling a label from a beetroot jar –
her cupboards were still full; spices, pins,
seeds for pots. All those flowers.
Eugene O’Hare recently won runner-up for the 52nd Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the poetry prize at Belfast Book Festival. His poems appear, or forthcoming, in The Frogmore Papers, Stand, Poetry Ireland Review, Acumen and others.
Paul Stephenson
The Conversation
It’s been quite a while now and…
You know we get on like a house…
August twelfth, a year ago, can you…
I bet you thank your lucky…
Things have evolved, haven’t…
Can you believe we’re both still …
Hannah Linden
She gives me a word to look up
in a dictionary of obscure sorrows.
I, who try to decipher echoes from
other people’s reaction to my words
throw down a bucket into the well
recognise water when people tell me
Nelly Bryce
Longing curls its legs up on the sofa in our house.
There’s a dip there now.
How I long to turn us into a day trip.
You belong in that chair over there
asking what happened with that text
and where I bought this jumper,
Cameron Tricker
See the local estate agent crooks
Ten a penny
Smoking their rollies, washed down with
protein
Pigeons with emerald necks
Elizabeth Osmond
Difficult doctors don’t care about their patients,
They are filling up hospitals and GP practices with their difficult bodies.
They are often late to work and shuffle into handover . . .
Jay Whittaker
. . . .We would go
to the cupboard where multi-packs
of Fine Fare’s basic crisps were sorted
into old shoe boxes, one for each child.
Kate Maxwell
I’d rather be inside
pretending I’m not
pretending commentary
inside my head
is real and here
Jim Murdoch
Some things we hold in trust,
some we forget we even own
and then there’re those items
we hang onto “just in case.”
Andrew McDonnell on Father’s Day
Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...