Guest Poems
We love to read your poetry and, even though we receive over 1,000 poems per month, we always take time to read every single one.
A few of the poems we especially enjoyed and which were selected for publication in our Journal are reprinted below.
For more information, please see our Submissions page.
Guest Poems
Eugene O’Hare
CPR
On his knees in the wet street he pressed
on the chest of a stranger older than his mother.
Gifting again her lungs with his breath, then hands
re-clasped in a kind of prayer-meets-compression.
(What are prayers anyway without repetition?
Or miracles, in this case, without a stranger’s breath?)
I tell you of the moment I watched that woman return
under the lips of a young man she had never seen before
and your chest suddenly expands
as if in one short outward breath he too rescued you
just as you had stopped noticing the birdsong of your life.
Susan Kambalu
Orcadian Inheritance
For Ann Scarth (née Harper), 1762 to 1867, Evie, Orkney
My dear child, you can travel the world
but I am bound to this place, this grey blue sky and sea,
this brown green land, red grey standing stones.
I live, I live, I lived a hundred years and more.
We farm, fish, head to the water’s edge and see
whales rise like ancient dreams; wave, crash, disappear.
I am rock, steadfast, buried within you
like brochs deep in sand I will never see, you explored,
and when, like me, you face harsh wind, ferocious waves,
bleak horizon, oppressive sky, barren land, incessant life,
remember your inheritance, my gift to you:
determined waves, constant wind, soft sky, continuous horizon,
faithful land, unchanging centuries. We will persist.
More Guest Poems
Clive Watkins
The Dance Morning Walk at Cannon Hall, Barnsley Electric orange, acid yellow, cyan, these bird-likeguardians, totems carved from pine and oak, installedin their set stations, keep watch over the narrow serpentine,the muddy island, this tangled wilderness of...
Emma Lee
A Rhizomic Persuasion Golden Shovel based on a quote from Elizabeth Heyrick’s ‘Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition: or an Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest and Most Effectual means of getting rid of West Indian Slavery’ In Leicester market watch whatpeople stop to buy,...
Doreen Hinchliffe
A Patch Of Sunlight Speaks Breathing the dust of centuries, I spreadmyself beneath your beam that slants above,its shaft across my face. Alone, I’m dead,my whole existence turns upon your love.Darkened by shadows, troubled by the soundof trampling feet, I long to fly...
John Tanner
Losing a Language Death-rattleon the pebbles. This is a tide that won’t return. The waves’ eloquencebreaking, leaving onlya scattering of shallow poolsthat shrink towards oblivion. Take this drypebble in your hand.Remember how the lips of the seacould make it...
Neil Elder
Fact or Fiction Mornings, I scroll through the news on my phone;I like to know the world still exists before leavingthe house. Though today, I don’t want to readabout how Europe is on fire and the ice capsare melting, I just don’t have capacity anymore.Instead I shall...
Anne Stewart
Charlie Charlie was huge – ‘last time I saw a spider as big as that’a man I loved had told me once ‘I tried to bash it with my shoeand it took it off me and hit me back…’ She was blackest black – glossy, plum of a body,short stout legs at the ready, eyes peeled better...
Jen Herron
The Dead They buried him in a shoeboxamongst the terraced stones,packed in tight as teeth. God help the hand that puts me there.Don’t sandblast my nameon a bookmarked bible slab.Don’t trap me in an eight by six,gawked at by the passing busas next door’s dog lifts its...
Dennis Tomlinson
Cheddar Gorge I walked up the road from Anne’s hotel,climbing onto limestone heights,kaleidoscope inside my head. I can’t … I can’t … it’s impossible … I thought the cliffs an awesome sight,below the bushes dropping steep,suffused in eerie golden light. I can’t … I...
Kate Hendry
Talking to Thrushes for Andy, of Maggie’s Centre Instead of you, I’ll talk to the thrush.As I can’t book an appointment,I’ll talk to a sparrow too – one that calls from the hawthorn.Or the nervous starlingon the green steel bridge. When birds are hidden, I’ll talkto...
Daljit Nagra
bells bearded men under straw hats at springgaudying the playground with ribbonsthat sprout from a maypole you’d go in groups round the canopybut recall the other times when snakes would descendthrough a nightmare in the airround your side of the bed till you’d find...
Sally Long
Loss My loss comes wrapped up in phrases:… no more funding… have to let you go. Yours has no such delicate packaging:the click and boom of gunshotsthat violate the rushing street,the angry blade that rips through flesh. I add the experience to my CV,gain advantage...
Robin Thomas
The Deliverance of St Peter David Teniers the younger, c.1645 On one side of the massive door,which stands unaccountably open,the guards, so steeped in reality it hurts,are playing dice, that means of transport fromreality into some other sphere of things,where it’s...
Maggie Wadey
On not Being the Last Bird to Sing my child’s face, stretchedin pain like a Noh mask, relaxesand she sleeps at last,leaving the land around usto lie awake under a crust of starsthat mists the sky with light likethe illuminated face of a watch.On the hillside, a hare...
Kevin Graham
Let’s Do Cartwheels and watch the great world spin.Everyone will be on the green againplaying football or tip the can.Parents will pop out every now and thento check we’re still alive and then some.All the flowerbeds will be shakingwith laughter, ickle secrets...
Jan FitzGerald
Daffodil Bulbs I could stare at these tubs of dirt all day,waiting for the miracle. This is where I buried them,swaddled in their papery skins now wintering in a secret hideawaylike swollen nodes of sleep. I envy their dark cocoons of privacy. One more change of...