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
Jeremy Robson
Raising the Spirit
Always such an unsettling time of year,
Christmas with its fake joviality departed, though
seasonal lights still blink from nearby gardens and
abandoned Christmas trees lie forlornly at
the roadside, drenched by the incessant rain.
Meanwhile the new year waits impatiently in the wings.
Who can say what it will bring, though we wish all
those whose lives we touch the best of everything,
knowing full well it’s not in our hands to dispense
such wondrous bounties.
Lost in thought, drink in hand, I stare through
the rain-speckled window at the silent street below,
the trees seemingly lifeless, and the buildings
too, as the evening gradually descends like an
unwanted guest who has arrived too soon.
Suddenly ablaze, the streetlights opposite stain
the pavement with their amber beams as the wind
picks up. There are shadows everywhere.
Patiently we must wait for the year’s agenda to unfold,
for daylight to return, for leaves to silently explode from
the bereft trees, for wars to cease, for smiles to reign.
Then we can charge our glasses again.
Nicki Griffin
Aftermath
We’d gone to Dublin in search of art
and found William Orpen
dispatched to record the Great War, all those boys
in muck and mire across French countryside
the gallery full of pink, land and sky in pastel shades,
not the colours you expect of brutal conflict.
Bodies abandoned, trenches and dugouts
desert of craters, stumps of buildings
remains of Thiepval, La Boisselle.
A prehistoric burial mound, pale gold in summer light
barbed-wired, tunnelled, mortared.
Mud, baked white, cleansed by sun,
bones scoured by wind and frost, skulls
detached from backbones, feet
scattered among cornflowers.
The final painting an altered landscape,
scrubbed by nature
wounds cleansed by sun and rain.
Later shoals of tiny white butterflies
would come to cloud a faultless sky
above the wonder of poppies.
More Guest Poems
Roberta Dewa
Edward Burra: Never Tell Anybody Anything In the endI gave up on people, my layered clowns,my boxers’ lips, my stroke-struck faces. InsteadI painted their standing gravestones, the long slicksof their tracks across the landscape. Sometimes,despite my best attempts,...
Martin Reed
Red Hares When I think of the haresome raggedy, angular graceraces through my mind. It comes unlooked forwhen chatting of nothing,rounding an August cornfield hedge, up and away across sharp stubble,square to the ground in an upright scurry,arcing its route to distant...
D.G. Herring
Thoughts on Crater 308 …io nol feci Dedalo…Dante's Inferno 29:116 It is freedom we sail to. Or this is our story. Who gets to flywhen the winds are not hers to control? Yet, there is nocoastline, nor even a sea. Only mind. And, when the wax melts, pesanteur. In the...
Frances Sackett
Amongst the Rubble from a photograph by Lee Miller All colour is bleached from the landscape.Only grey dust, ash falling, dereliction.The children sit in the rubble, face in hands,horrified that their homes have gone.The boy, eldest of the three,is creased with...
Ranald Barnicot
After a Concert II But music does not always unite.Armies clash on through the night,Ignorant, in aesthetic spite.Brahmsians, Wagnerians brawl,Trash composers, concert hall.Igor Stravinsky’s Spring RiteProvokes all Paris to riot!Mods and rockers rev and roast:‘There’s...
Kate Noakes
Is it Crazy to Wish them Happiness? Some friends don’t get angry in flaming emojisor start nonsensical fights with others, voice their disagreements in no uncertain termsor claim superior knowledge of diverse subjects. They don’t much like things. OK, they never like...
Edith Speers
Tennis Club Indoor Courts aquarium worldseen through thick glasssubterranean silence four-limbed fishstrange white fishin a green and white world the walls are light green on topdraped on the bottomwith dark green cloth dark green flooris subdivided and outlinedby...
John Killick
Anglezarke As Edward Thomas his Adlestropso I my Anglezarke,but with this difference:for him it was the nameon the station signand the tranced afternoon;for me it is the namethe rest clean goneconjures the feeling,but there must have beenwater, woods, fields, for...
Annie Kissack
Saint with Accoutrements after ‘Mrs Mounter at the Breakfast Table’ by Harold Gilman All spotless. Some objects we might deemespecially significant:the glistening tea pot, pristine cupslustrous milk bowl, the best surely.We inhale diverse aromas:odour of home-made...
Jonathan Steffen
Car Coat Through all the subtle chicanes of his existence in the 1960s,It was his constant companion –That car coat redolent of hairpin bends and handbrake turns,Bearing him along shopping parades and in and out of supermarkets,Evoking pine-clad mountains and Alpine...
Judith Wozniak
Back to Nature i.m. J.S. You liked to sleep outat the edge of your gardenunder a scatter of starstucked into your bivouacon a bed of leavessoothed by a soft breezedrift over the South Downsthe smell of honeysuckleafter rain the rustleof hedgehogs in the compostto wake...
Robert Leach
Horse A pool of shadowShapes the lonely placeWhere the old horse stands.He shakes his head. Remote fromCows, sheep, people,It seems farming proceedsAround, beyond him. His tufty fetlocks apeThe head-heavy cow parsley,Hair grass, oval sedgeUnheeded at the field’s edge....
Helen Ashley
On Stage Small spillages of lightare gathered on the woodland floor.Invisible strings tie themto the matrix of branches above. Sun, looking down through the canopy,has assembled them and standsas director, while a light breezetakes on the choreography. To their...
Terry Sherwood
Warning Signs gracing sea and coastland: kittiwake herring gull puffingracing wetlands: curlew whimbrel lapwinggracing grassland: fieldfare yellowhammer skylarkgracing waterlands: goldeneye...
Piers Cain
Half life It all depends which way you turn in the halflight, in the space between day and nightor between one year and another. It affects how much your eye adapts, and how darkor bright the sky you face, how soon or latefor you the night draws in. And when you walk...