Today’s choice
Previous poems
Elizabeth Loudon
Forty (for Maryna)
The first three days of war
have a surprising holiday feel.
No deadlines, just the giddy gasp of shock.
Ordinary life continues.
The girl in white socks in the flat downstairs
plays a prelude then turns, pleased,
to an audience of one, who awakes
as if from a deep sleep
and manages to applaud.
Later, you hear sirens and grab sugar lumps
for the baby, throw slippers to your father
who can’t tie his shoes.
In the tunnels you sit close together for warmth.
Nobody sings. In the cold you realise
you left your favourite red jacket on the bus,
but this is no time for tantrums
when there are boys face down,
all for a few square metres of mud,
who were once face down upon you.
It takes forty nights to become accustomed
to anything that strips you to the core:
a difficult birth, cold-eyed jailor,
our failure to come to your rescue.
The little green light beside your name
still said available. Any earlier,
we’d have screwed up our entrance.
It’s not easy, either, sitting on the side-lines
and stroking the lithium-lit news, over and over.
It looks like we’re smiling.
We’re not. It’s what our faces do
when they hurt, stuffed with words
that are hard to spit, harder to swallow.
If you’d only feel sorry for us.
Elizabeth Loudon is a poet and novelist living in southwest England after 25 years in the US. She writes about violence, loss and displacement, and mothers and daughters. When not writing, She’s mostly outside. There’s more at www.elizabethloudon.com.
Sue Butler
Squirrels have beheaded all my parrot tulips
and the supermarket is out of chilli, also tabasco sauce.
Cormac Culkeen
the sun is a
white coin
lifted
from the sea
Maurice Devitt
Yes, you gave us your elegant hands
and capricious smile, but as I make my way
to the chiropodist this morning,
it’s your feet I’m thinking of . . .
Martin Ferguson
Pursue the facsimile
of the attendance sign;
here you must join the line.
Peter Branson
Emerge, from way beyond the pale, one day,
clenched feet an amulet about your wrist
Alice Huntley
carved from the tusk of my grandmother
I am learning how to remember
Bel Wallace
My dad is thinking geometrically,
eyes closed; he waves his arms
Sarah Crowe
they gave me the cold
cap to stop my chemo
hair falling out
Daniel Dean
A beastly man swallowing leeks. His throat
Is dirt, and yet his ghost could sit with Raphael