Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jeff Skinner
Erato
It takes ages. Tell me what it is you’re after
she says, when finally I get through.
Rain, I answer, rain that falls softly
in a garden, and on the Aegean,
the noise they make together,
trees in the rain, and the way rain brightens
the green leaves and the blue tiles
shine like new. Is that everything? she asks
and I say, yes it is, for the moment, yes.
Jeff Skinner’s poems have been published in anthologies and journals, most recently in Poetry News, Allegro, Drawn to the Light. He was commended in the recent Sonnet or Not competition. He volunteers at his local food bank, reads, writes.
Jean O’Brien
The Arrow that Flies by Day (Psalm 91) To my first readers I present fragments, half- rhymes, vowels, words, somewhere a metronome beats time and we split the line into syllables, metric feet, then come the myths and metaphors, music sounds near....
Julie Maclean
I take a torch to 4am climb the stairs so I can be closer to the moon or Venus, something private, divine Moisture on the roof out of nowhere suggests autumn is creeping in like the possum whose red eyes in the beam are jewels of curiosity or fear...
Mark Blaeuer
Harlan & Siv Euglena Harlan presides at our Church of Gullibility in the Vale, accused of murdering his younger self. Prosecutor Marat Siv arrays testimony, exhibits, arguments against the Judge-Who-Rules-at-Pulpit. During a recess, Siv...
Peter J Donnelly
Auntie Joyce I knew your face when I saw you from the backseat window in the hospital car park where you stood talking to my dad, so I must have seen you before then. Perhaps at your son’s wedding, for you had to be there. I remembered you also...
Miranda Lynn Barnes
Norwegian Trees Still Bear Evidence of a WWII German Battleship According to their research, one tree sampled saw no new growth for nine years after 1945. - The Smithsonian Imagine a ship pulls up into your fjord and releases a cloud of...
Emily Cullen
Coping Because I had a vivid dream I could telephone you in Heaven, somewhere my brain believes it’s true; delusion is a kind of redemption. My conscious mind habituated to our almost-daily conversation, my unconscious has found a line to sustain...
Becky May
My Swallows after Ann Gray I talk to the swallows as they dip and dive wonder if they return because of me. I tell them the cactuses are dying, that I'm the wild boar rooting around for grubs, that I don't sleep much these days. I tell them the...
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...