Today’s choice
Previous poems
Seán Street
Candlelight
We lit a candle for you
that day in Sacre Coeur,
under its white-flame dome
as high as Paris could go
and still be Paris, stood there
awhile as the dark fire
caught, aspiring to spirit,
then turned as the dusk church rang
with candles, remembering
beers and salades gourmand
in the streets by the Sorbonne
held by a small fountain of light
that became the pole star
for this blank page, and which
as far as I know burns still
as high as Paris can go,
and Sacre Coeur, escaping
like you the prison of shape
through this small portal, glows white.
Seán Street’s latest is Running Out of Time (Shoestring Press, 2024). Prose includes works on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Dymock Poets, as well as a number of studies of sound poetics, the latest of which, Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong was published by Bloomsbury, (paperback edition in May, 2025.) Previous prose includes The Poetry of Radio, The Memory of Sound and The Sound of a Room, published by Routledge. He has worked in audio production for more than 50 years and lives in Liverpool. He is emeritus professor at Bournemouth University.
Shamik Banerjee
A Rumination
With ginger chai, lounged in the balcony,
Revisiting the years she and her spouse
Endeavoured for a better, self-owned house,
She takes a breath of content, finally.
Benedicta Norell
Questions
We were always in the car that year the price of having a nice house in a nice area get in get
in it’s time to go where are we going our friends the supermarket the cinema the mall just for
a drive between banks of jaded shovelled snow
Kathy Pimlott
It’s impossible to foretell what will provoke tears, the sort
that well up and tip over while you hold onto the kitchen sink
waiting for them to subside…
Ali Murphy
Mean sister We are stuck in our own words, not hearing each other. Sixty-somethings, we may as well be six, throwing sticks down the beck or poking dolls eyes out of their sockets, scribbling on their perfect faces. We are well rehearsed, know our cues,...
Bruach Mhor
I heard a calm, clear voice.
But not with my ears. Not my outward ears.
It wasn’t madness…
Moira Garland
tall as the absentee house.
How the girl moored her hands and heart charmed by riven bark…
Maureen Jivani
I dream I’m at the hospital
massaging your feet, your tiny feet
that I have freed from their tight
white stockings…
Jayant Kashyap
We are in the bath, your hands
around my back, mine around yours—
everything covered in a fog.
Jane Holland
When fog falls over Rough Tor,
the world creaks
on the end of a string…