Today’s choice
Previous poems
David Lukens
Samaras
Having earned their wings through evolution
it is almost as though they are loth to use them
preferring familiar earth, the old tree’s broad shadow.
Everywhere you look these whips of sycamore, living
where they fell, rooting out some well of nourishment
in a wall, a bed, a yoghurt pot of rotting leaves.
And so many of them! Impossible to count their bristling ranks
like massed souls grumbling on the banks of Lethe
jostling to be noticed as the fates allot each life.
Was there a single moment — when the air darkened,
and down they span like fallen angels, a forest
carried within their collective spinning wings?
I do my bit, kneeling to uproot individual stems
while the tits turn cartwheels in the old tree’s limbs.
I know this is no more or less than they expect.
Underground, a widening web of roots
is slowly moulding faith from darkness
settling itself for the rise and fall of years.
David Lukens lives in Wiltshire. His work has been published in magazines such as Acumen, Butcher’s Dog and Under the Radar. His pamphlet One Brief Wave won the Cheltenham Poetry Festival’s first pamphlet competition and was published in 2021
Jason Ryberg
Still Life of Fish and Bird
Mark McDonnell
Fascinated by the priest’s teeth I don’t realise
I’m kicking the pew in front with a restless foot
until someone taps me sharply on the knee.
James Mason
In Italian I have no inner life.
With no past or future tense
My needs are immediate.
Claire Miller
rose is thirsty
rose senses water
rose root rummages in the earth
rose root punctures lung and frontal lobe
rose stem is a green straw sucking
Sylvia Banham
Pigeons have invaded the garden, two then four, then a flock.
They roost in the apple tree to nest, reconnoitre or mate
ignore my sorties to deter them and shit without stint
on patio and herb bed, foul lovely hyssop and thyme.
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri
What matters now is the feast of this survival.
The glory of our own light, black light.
Look at us: the deeper the root, the sweeter the juice.
Glory of the blacker berry, split wide open to the sun.
Robert Billinski
the sky met the water where the birds met the fish
the sky met the water where the fish met the birds
the sky met the birds where the water met the fish
Gordon Vells
Impotent in family life and ineffectual at work,
sometimes he would spend a full quarter-hour
just circulating the mini-roundabout on his moped,
dizzy from the power of blocking everyone else.
Patrick Wright
i protest say how when i’m gone i’d like to rest before the choice to return & go through
all this again you sigh as though that’s absurd & endings are just endings we’re mulch
& nothing but endless fucking