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
Seán Street
Breakfast with Michael Longley
River and Fountain
From beyond the window October’s memory
of what summer might have been poured in, and there
was Billie singing God Bless the Child, there was
sun through the apple juice, dazzling the table.
There was Hart Crane, there was Wallace Stevens,
time murmuring and the toast crumbling,
Kunitz, Masefield, Stevens, talk of poets who sang
with you: Heaney, there was Mahon, Muldoon,
the dance of a new poem made, poems
flowing from Pee Wee Russell’s clarinet,
and you said – and the coffee was my witness –
prose is a river, poetry a fountain,
and I knew that because you’d written it, because
I’d long had the text in my head and by heart,
but to hear you say it. To hear you say it…
the table white, silver, a Ghost Orchid there,
Fats Waller’s Honeysuckle Rose. And then it rained,
but Billie sang I’ll find you in the morning sun,
so Autumn resumed, playing still-bright notes that
fell through harvest light, prisms in every one.
Caroline Maldonado
Foraging for the Ideal
The lights of Macerata, Loreto, Treia
pulse across each hilltop town
and fireflies
swing their lamps
over the earth
to echo the stars.
There’s the scent of
laurel, rosemary, lavender
wild mint and fennel.
L’amore che move il sole
e l’altre stelle warms the
perfume of my lover’s skin.
I follow the poets
– so help me –
searching through
the emptiness without
& the darkness within
through villages atilt
after the quake,
through mud that slides
Senigallia’s town to the Adriatic,
in a city through blackshirts
who chant their presence,
arms raised in the Roman salute.
We forage here,
we forage there
for l’ideale che illumina.
More Guest Poems
Carolyn McCurdie
To Cleave This morning a sheer, immaculate skywas bisected horizon to horizonby interlacing white and blue threads of a cloud formation,delicate, curling filaments, intricate weavingsthat bound east to west. And held their breath. I stood at my back door, thinking...
Daljit Nagra
parka your brother’s made friends with two boys down the roadwho are your own backgroundwith their parents from the villages in Punjab they’re in his year and they’ve been mixing languagestill they giggle their heads offslipping from rugged London to farmer’s Punjabi...
Antony Mair
The Other It presses againstmy consciousnesslike a curtain blownby a wind outside. No windows free usfrom our senses’ prisonand linear timeconstricts. But in that other placethere are no walls;past, present, future,stroll together. I cannot shiftthe curtain’s...
Kathleen McPhilemy
Egret and Heron Late afternoon, December, in the gloamingacross the bridge near the Willow Walka little egret: black beak, long black legsstartling yellow feet hidden in the grass.I lift binoculars to see him more clearlyand there behind is a spectral followergrey,...
Janet Laugharne
Sightseeing A few summers ago,the cloudless blue a markerto my memory that it was duringCovid times,I saw above my city gardenthat fantastic single bird.A few flaps of its gigantic wingsand it was gone,passing over Cardiff and who knows where else;not in any hurry for...
Christopher Levenson
Insomnia It’s a country I sometimes visitbut I wouldn’t want to live there.Even at 3 or 4 a.m., the bathroom’sstainless steel fixtures, white tiles,hold their own, maintaina careful sanity. The blatant light rejectsany transfusion of darkness. By adjusting the mirrors...
Rachel Mann
England, Ice Fixed, White with Rage From a train, always train, acres of whiteness, and I watchPast or future, fields of time, seen/unseen, fields of it, the presentRefuses, I only want it more, and gods of modest means,Not first rankers, not famous ones with...
Philip Gross
Small Rain, the Sound of Breathing The way a little too much cautioncreaks the floorboards more than clumsiness –so the rain, tonight, small spatters, all around the house… The way I ease the body-weightof last night’s sleep to the edge of the bed…Its cartilages...
Philip Dunkerley
The Repair Shop Give me, please, this evening hourof rest, let me sit safely herewatching the show, alone, at home,in the quiet of this room,others busy, nearby, elsewhere,as another day ends. I have chosen this programmefrom all those that tell of the past,carefully...
Paula Sankelo
We Learned That Everything Drifts Green and Purple in the Barents Sea almost everything: R/V Lance wasgrounded deep on an unlucky reef we heard Mayday and drove to assistancesleepless the entire sunlit night. Humming a shanty we wrote for the rescue– our captain...
Tytti Heikkinen
Big Morning in Rome In the hot magenta of a dark alley,a photoallergic inamorato sees the lady of his lifeand wants nothing more.He rushes through porticos and tourist crowdswho wave positive cardio imagesin the chiaroscuro of endless fog. The lady waits on the...
Martyn Crucefix
Salisbury (short let) In the year of the election, in early June,the third year of the war, the four of uswoken – we thought – by the whinnyingof horses; architecture with a sense of irony:we discover the best (least obstructed)view of the famous cathedral is fromthe...
Steve Denehan
A Poem from My Mother to My Father The way you standcrooked, stoopedin doorwaysunsure of where, why, what the way you asked mejust last weekif we knew each other the way I have to dress youwash youtell youthe time, the day, the season the way you look at melast...
Elisabeth Murawski
To Grieve Like Kollwitz That night in mid-January,I prayed to the Godof waiting rooms, swimming for my life,and yours.I can still summon that fear,waking before dawnwith tears and cries for help,a litanyof the impoverished. The silencesurrounded uslike an absence I...
Mike Everley
Soul Music3 – Swallows My uncle and I flew paper swallows from the high bedroom window. They caught the lifting wind, drifted above the narrow road and pointed metal railings that had somehow escaped the Spitfire Fund, into the small park with its swings, roundabout...