Today’s choice
Previous poems
Julie Egdell
Notes from the Constanta train station
At the shore of impossibility
last moments come to nothing
all our plans die in the salt air
of another new day on the black sea.
There is a sadness in the way
we leave the ocean in summer
that no cocaine laughter
or Polinka smiles can endure.
The heat oppresses.
Nothing good lasts.
The beach dreamers, hippies,
day trippers and holiday makers
are slumped in the Constanta
train station, surrounded by
dying sunflowers.
They did not find love or redemption
on the last shores of Europe
and must go, blinking,
to their own realities
the holiday not being theirs anymore,
never having been theirs, to hold.
We must let go the salt from our lips
the sand from our hair, leaving trails
of it for miles.
What awaits them all?
The ones who leave?
The ones who stay?
It’s impossible, in these last moments,
to feel the ocean all around me
like the belly of a whale.
It seems that summer is over
and all our time has run out.
I exhale as the train
takes me through fields of wildflowers
to England
and eventual home –
time having been and gone
and everything coming to nothing
and still so far to go.
Julie Egdell is a poet from North Shields. Her debut collection Alice in Winterland (Smokestack) explores her time living in Russia. She received an Arts Council grant to develop it into a multimedia show performed in the UK, Finland and Russia.
Ruth Stacey
Colour is Distracting Feel the Prussian Blue pushing against the eyelids. Oxide Green touches the arch of an undressed foot. Raw Umber brushes against the neglected fold of an elbow and leaves a Red Ochre rash. Gold and Silver fill the throat....
Smitha Sehgal
Chutney Music paint the bones of irascible day, braided light, sway of blue mist, island sunrise, yellow bird perches on cordwood, migrant wind, I become a sand house, half-closed eyes, listening to musty ripe poems that hold doors to the last...
Massimiliano Nastri
When You Leave, Two Are Leaving One behaves like foreign media: Only notices the events’ cracks, not the water drops hollowing the stones, The ballet school the kids used to go to, its eyes gorged out The dentist’s chair now in the middle of the...
Simon Williams
Mysterious Primates I’ve seen them again – actually not that hard to catch sight, there are so many of them, now. We call them ‘small feet’ because of their prints; their adults’ match our smallest children’s. They wear skins – so little hair – all kinds...
Patrick B. Osada
Hares New born, the leveret hunkers down, this shallow grassy form its only refuge. From the field gate — one careless step away — it faces lowering skies and April deluge. Furred and mobile, leverets grow up fast — once an evening visit from their...
Neil Fulwood
Chef (i.m. Kevin Higgins) You saw the world for what it was and responded with a flambé of possibility. You saw the charlatans for who they were and knew exactly the combination of spices to season them with before you roasted them. The truth was...
Tanya Parker
Circus We are the leave-takers, rolling our hearts in tents. Rootless, our life is soil, any soil. With the first flutters of red we drive a stake in a ground, peg ourselves to the here and now. Harlequin knows the grist of a place, instantly: takes his...
Patrick Wright
Postcard - Untitled Before Mark Rothko As the floor gives way, I’m a bird always burning up in the desert. Every few years, I tear off my layers. I eat the ashes of predecessors. I’m the torment of cells, neural connections. I’ve learned the...
Alison Jones
Union This marriage was not meant to happen, too hasty, driven by needing to make everything right. Late night urge to clean my grandmother's saucepans, to rekindle how it was to be hearthside with her. Too keen and desperate, now look at the...