Today’s choice
Previous poems
Linda McKenna
Smashing Narcissus
We set about him with rifle butts and spades,
waiting our turn alongside our enemies,
the same sunburnt flesh, the same blistered
feet. Met where our camps, the same badly
pitched shelters, the same lack of meat,
converged. Laboured in the stifling heat
at the command of our officers, the same
fools and bullies. Smashed and smashed
at the indecently gleaming white marble,
until the lawn sparkled with a covering
of unseasonable frost. Later, picking splinters
from the same worn-out blankets, knew
if we looked into the shimmering lake
we would see the true picture of ourselves.
Linda McKenna’s second collection, Four Thousand Keys, was published by Doire Press in 2024. The title poem from her debut collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, (Doire Pres 2020), won the 2020 An Post Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year. She has had poems published in a wide range of publications and in 2018 won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing.
Heather Holcroft-Pinn
These things I know,
and in knowing, can do . . .
Ruth Higgins
You wrestle the car seat’s five-point harness,
scrabble for a foothold in the new life.
Olive M Ritch
We Need to Talk about Shoes
The right shoes
for work, party, funeral.
Kathryn Anna Marshall
Grandad keeps pigeons and canaries
in the same cage. He has never hurt me. He probably could . . .
Cindy Botha
That way a river crimps eddies in its skin
is this matter of my unreliable breath.
Colin McGuire
You’d come in the front door
and whistle, I’d be upstairs
and whistle back
Gerry Stewart
In My Last Phone Call Did I say it looks like rain? I meant the sky is black with a thirst only crying can quench, clouds smothering the hills. Did I say this was my home? It was a mistake. The walls are collapsing even as I paint myself into a...
S Reeson
There is no evidence anywhere that Albert Einstein ever said the definition of insanity is ‘is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’ except there he is, all over the Internet, being attributed with having done exactly that.
Annie Kissack
No place to put a man
and hope he’ll stay together.
The sensible nouns are already exiting the side door.