Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gordon Scapens
Forecasts of Flight
Stripping wallpaper
leaves naked the scrawls
of yesteryear’s children,
small forecasts of flights
that are inevitable.
Youthful skill teasing
dreams of rocket ships,
large soaring birds,
treasure islands,
galloping horses,
and measurements of growth.
We will save them
behind new covering,
seal past in present
to keep for future.
Now I watch a small tear
confess on your face
worries we’ve shared
in their growing years
that can’t be hidden,
and come free for parents,
but cost a lifetime
of a sort of hunger
that’s made-to-measure.
Gordon Scapens has been widely published over many years in numerous magazines, journals, anthologies and competitions, most recently won first prize in the Brian Nisbet poetry award. His latest book is ‘History Doesn’t Die’
Carolyn Oulton
Toast Ken (now Kenneth) shrugs. He can’t have his liver ripped out after all without his reading glasses. I have Alzheimer’s. Those marshes. I know. Nigel (already regrettable) shares a name with – let’s leave it at that. Sends new guidelines,...
Adrian Slatcher
Mechanical Bear I would give you a mechanical bear and watch it move across the table-top. Soon the mechanism would go, poor bear, but you’d improvise and make it climb walls. No bear in history had made it as far. The first bear in space, the...
Bob King
The Cosmos of Small Details: When A Young Poet Asked for Advice For Dean Young (1955-2022) Hey Bro, how do we know what’s real? Like what’s really real? Can you actually prove to me dinosaurs existed? Prove evolution? Prove radio waves? Gravity,...
Nina Nazir
Star Walks, biro on paper, 2022 (text source from Sum: Tales of the Afterlife, David Eagleman, p.21) Consistency, gel pen & biro on paper, 2022 (text source from The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg, p.111) Nina Nazir is a British Pakistani poet,...
Philip Foster
The Perfect Platonic Prison The canal is the most perfect of mirrors reflecting the purples and blues of the boats and the greens and blacks and blues of the trees. They all reach down in perfect symmetry. There are shabby huts and black cats....
David Callin
Bunnies? We were delicate creatures once: shy, wide-eyed, exotic incomers. Holes had to be dug for us. Always toothsome, we have descended the scale of what is desirable, losing caste, coarsening, getting bigger, faster, fitter, more inured to...
Ramona Herdman
She runs a circus now Her will drives them round the world – a cavalcade of needy clowns, prima donna gymnasts, tigers. Even in mufti, you can sense the whip back on its hook by her basking boots. They keep changing the legislation, so she runs...
Jacqueline Haskell
Convergence After that first year, they were never the same, the planners with their Glastonbury smiles, their beatnik topology, though they still carried the henge inside them, a degree or two of slippage was lost at the roundabout, the...
Ruth Aylett
Essential Worker Queen of the sandwich bar she moves no financial indices, wears blue overalls without red braces. She has planned every movement, her rapid questions in optimum order ‘eat in?’ ‘flora on your roll?’ ‘jalapenos?’ ‘salad with...