Today’s choice
Previous poems
Daniel Hill
Pollarding
An ancient art of tree management, in which the top branches of trees are removed
to promote dense new growth, provide light to the understory & fodder for animals.
On her first day home, she took
to plucking the sky with tweezers—
latched on to clouds and waited
for their let-down. She must’ve known
it should please us just to see her
new, blue eyes shine through
the rain. It didn’t, so she spat up
on the earth and summoned vines
of bindweed to wind around our chests.
When she still had no success, she drew
an axe and hacked halfway up our necks
to send our heads toppling
into rabbit warrens. Lopped,
we sent out fragile shoots
and watched the understory
thriving below.
Daniel Hill is a Welsh poet living in Hertfordshire. His debut pamphlet is forthcoming with The Wildheart Press in May 2026. Instagram: hill_daniel_
Kexin Huang
She came growling at me like a wolf,
muttering moonlight out of her throat
Joe Crocker
Hold a rule beside her measured look.
Precisely fix the time it took
to meet and break away.
David Adger
being unnatural
he fixes his sight past the fields
of bere and oat and the woods
of birch, his goat-eyes watch
two worlds at once
NJ Hynes
It was so quiet she could hear her hair grow,
heartbeat stretch across measures, nails twist
into mobius strips . . .
Steph Morris
from another picture swiped a nice cyan
tore the lemon horrors off it
and slapped it straight
in this picture . . .
Amlanjyoti Goswami
In one of those colourful stalls
A gentle man with golden fingers
Carves a wheelbarrow from broken wood
Jacquie Wyatt
I think of that study that showed
the smaller the animal
the slower time passes for them…
Lara Frankena
The poet disregards the soup
she reencounters it on the hob
at a merry boil
not a slow simmer as instructed…
Antonia Taylor
That year I hunted Emily Dickinson. Stood at her grave as the snowbank split me open. Further from love than I’d ever been.