Today’s choice

Previous poems

Clive Donovan

 

 

 

Three Winds

I go to the top of the risen hill,
above the trees, beyond the grass,
where only hard ground lives
—and three winds mingle, whispering,

all merging in a jostle.
They use my body frame to make sound
and, listening, I hear, as they tell
where they’ve been and where they go:

You, man, with a gravestone in your heart,
let us shake your woes away
and they do, they really do,
they rattle my teeth with generosity.

I retreat,

my cold hands in empty pockets,
full of the wisdom of the great silence.

 

 

Clive Donovan has three poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021], Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and Movement of People [Dempsey&Windle 2024] and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Crannog, Ink Sweat & Tears, Prole and Stand.  
 

Rachael Davey

That particular, chemical clarity,
sun into blue, ripples on the ceiling.

Rare days when water rests
between the ropes, unbroken . . .

Chrissy Banks

. . . Yes, I’ve tasted pomegranates
and I know what they do. The sense of vertigo:
happily dizzy at first, as if you’ve downed
a bottle of Shiraz or Merlot. You live by night . . .

Karen Luke

My sister’s father wound is the flush cut
on the bark where she lost her foothold
and fell,
the trunk burning red between her thighs
all the way down the tree to the ground…