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
Joan McGavin
A Painting of Yellow Roses
if it’s a good one
can make you see again
how it’s dusk, in the countryside
with a farm in the distance
but you’re so up close
to the flowers you can almost
reach out and touch
their full-blown petals.
There’s a hazy light
that makes it seem
like a slight mist hangs around
the blooms. You can tell
which petal might fall
first. It would be the softest
collapse you could imagine –
and that one petal
would set in motion a whole
bloom shedding its layers.
The painting is poised
at the moment
before that happens:
the slither groundwards.
In the meantime
all you can do is
pause and smell
the roses.
Michael Higgins
To my Partner on the Way to Mars
You recede to nothing.
The easy intertwining way we have
is stretched and broken
by this unnatural distance.
We must wait slow minutes for each
question and response, each disjointed
fragment of conversation.
And yet, my warm and living thoughts
still flow across the dark;
the emptiness plucked like a string,
singing notes of love,
which, rippling past your fragile craft,
stir the dancing patterns of your brain
to merge in fire which knows itself and sees the universe.
Like gravity which masters time and builds
the random fabric of the void
into vastnesses of worlds
and intricacies of insects’ wings,
so the love between us,
invisible, immutable, a binding force,
which shapes and makes us everything.
More Guest Poems
Damon Moore
Bayeux Fascination with our own story is notthe same as self-fascination… But is it? Which of them, of these?Doe-eyed, woollen,William soft and slippered? Which of them, of these?Red steed, black harnessed,wetted in hardly credible waves,provisioners, boat-makers,...
Kim Waters
After Otto Dix’s Poet Iwar von Lücken (1926) who is hethis poetwho liveddiagonally to life his brown suit hanging in jowls over his soft- ...
John Knowles
Piano Roll They would have seen itin the first piano rolls. No musicwithout ‘the space between the notes’.How the music takes place in silence, the white paperunrolling with its morseof dots, of held dashes. Eachrecorded performance unique. Would have seen how each...
Merryn Williams
A Flower Fairy Alphabet Still searching for scarlet pimpernel and toadflax,endangered cowslips – no luck. Even onchalkland, beside the Edward Thomas stone,the flowers are poor and few. I learned up toa hundred names from the famous Flower Fairies –those little books I...
Leonard Lambert
Cartographic i.m. Dave Walker Vanished friends toss youinto altered terrain,as if some surveyorsof the heartwere hazily erasing landmarks,former features,wearily redrawingyour inner universe,the sad cartography of...
Jackie Hutchinson
Orca A discus slicing water into two camps.Point surge tipped from abundance to scarcity,current knowledge (bound) in an oceanic history. She balances the world’s memory into yin yang black,strikes above the wave, whose day is showering blueyearns the absence of super...
Gavin Lyon
My Garden I have been here far too longwith the grass growing through mesprouting up on my toes and chest,flowers adorning my hair.A bird perches on the lawnof my leg watching the beespollinate the laurel of my head.The woodlice inside my hearthave burrows through its...
Elizabeth Cook
Avoir du Poids Degas knew it: the weightof his hand on thick paperas he pressed down or skimmedwith a crayon. The strong armof the Repasseuse as she guides the hot ironround the seams of chemisesand blousons: the outs and insof complicated pleats. Miss La La– how the...
Eugene O’Hare
CPR On his knees in the wet street he pressedon the chest of a stranger older than his mother. Gifting again her lungs with his breath, then handsre-clasped in a kind of prayer-meets-compression. (What are prayers anyway without repetition?Or miracles, in this case,...
Susan Kambalu
Orcadian Inheritance For Ann Scarth (née Harper), 1762 to 1867, Evie, Orkney My dear child, you can travel the worldbut 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...
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...