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.
Daniel Hill
On her first day home, she took
to plucking the sky with tweezers—
latched on to clouds and waited
Sheila Saunders
Which is the subject?
Limp-leaved yucca
reluctantly dying,
the foreground figure
in its stony pot?
Trelawney
What is holding you back from building your wormery?
You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
David Van-Cauter
…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad. . .
Tim Dwyer
Unexpectedly
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air
Paul Moclair
Their shore leave over,
. . . the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again.
Susan Elizabeth Hale
Sometimes words are the only thing
that get you through,
But not the words you think,
not a word like love or hope
those are imprecise.
Seán Street
We lit a candle for you
that day in Sacre Coeur,
under its white-flame dome
as high as Paris could go
Marjory Woodfield
On Kinley’s Lane, quince tree, wild blackberries, branches of feijoa reaching over a fence, fallen fruit.