Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gemma Blakeley
My Dad Complains That The Hedges Are Overgrown
and the word bemuses me, implying as it does
the concept of excess in what can only be good.
Why do we crave these straight lines and
clean edges? The hedge itself
is a border, a defining.
A this is mine.
And this is yours.
A there and here.
An us and them.
Why not let it keep a little wildness?
Not for me this lopping and shaping,
this trimming and taming,
ruling and restricting-
Hear this- there are things
which cannot be governed, like
certain tendrilous tendencies
of a hedgerow heart
and those sacred things which live inside…
Father, I will not reach for the blade.
There is no such thing as too alive.
Gemma Blakeley is a teacher, mother, nature-lover and aspiring writer. She will have her first poetry published in Black Bough Poetry‘s Winter 2026 Anthology later this year. She lives in Shropshire with her husband, two children and the cat.
Gita Ralleigh, Julian Matthews, Jackie Taylor on Colouring Outside the Lines
The hue of brides, appliquéd dark with henna.
Citron’s acid curl, vernal blades between teeth.
Sue Moules
I sell the postcard
of multi-coloured sheep
over and over again.
Kevin Denwood
Name called.
Not mine.
Wasn’t I
here first?
L Kiew
I leave everything on shingle,
meet surf like a sibling,
crest over playful breakers
and chase the moon’s tail.
Margaret Baldock
We launched, lovingly
into dark and silky water
unknown yet benign.
Krishh Biswal
You did not ask for knees —
They found the floor themselves.
Not from command,
But gravity.
Tamara Salih
That winter the snow kept rising,
a slow white wall climbing the windows,
each morning untouched,
Alicia Byrne Keane
I’ve been reading about ghost apples.
They are a real phenomenon, like how
everyone we can see on the wide street
outside this building is still living,
Gareth Culshaw
I tried to work from a van. Sitting in the passenger
seat listening to a guy whistle. His frown, a cloud
he lost when his mother died. Each wrinkle