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
David Seddon
Return
This is a note to say I’ve arrived
in Nowhere-next-the-Sea,
I’ve dumped the baggage overboard
but sent you back the key.
Hang out the washing on the cliffs,
flap and wave the cloth;
skiffs will flex their ribs and strakes –
embrace the water’s wash.
Sun shall rake through tattered flax,
unfurl a curling sail –
the wake has swirled around the bay,
is foaming at the wall;
the silent shoals are bladder-strung,
shrill shale takes the song;
the mermaid sinks and lolls her tail
and rolls her sea-pink tongue.
While mists and salts sit on the air
I’ll wear nothing but the sea.
When the wind blows up, I will return –
Listen. Call to me.
Doreen Hinchliffe
In The Wind’s Singing
voices are in the wind’s singing
T. S. Eliot
The sound of the wind beneath the door
is nothing new, and yet tonight
I feel compelled to listen to its music.
It sings of a rickety stile, a gate that creaks
and fields where blackberries hang in clusters,
meandering over miles of dry stone walls.
I hear the drone of far-off bees and bluebottles,
the swish of a butterfly net and a sudden whoosh
of breath, scattering the fuzz on a dandelion clock.
Footsteps echo down a moonlit path
where hedgehogs snuffle in the undergrowth
and the call of a tawny owl bewitches.
Something more than memory is moving
under whispers of cicadas in the wild grass
enveloping the long-abandoned railway track.
Something deeper than history is stirring
in the rhythmic plop of pebbles skimmed on water,
the song of the sea in a beachcombed shell.
More Guest Poems
R. A. Zafar
Cracks Like a row of graves the shrunken pots of paint line the windowsill each one sits on a pale strip painted by you. You asked me too many times what shade I wanted for our naked bedroom all the colours looked the same. Your favourite was eggshell white – you said...
Daniel Boland
Poppies by the Sea Orangey-red prayer flags of the past – they are opium – a secret incense. They are a doorway to everything – from a small room to an endless blue seascape. They launch all the people that you have encountered – the living and the dead. They are the...
Clair Chilvers
For Beirut A cento I Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon, as beautiful as the famed city of Atlantis. Walk through the lonely ancient woods hear the voices from the Cedars of Lebanon....
D.W. Evans
The Other One Opening the blue door of a shed he had called The Other One, his old straw hat tips from a nail, doffed by a breeze predicting a storm. Its crown’s unwinding like a work unfinished, black band sweat salted - so much garden slog under a few retirement...
Roger Harvey
Rooks Greedy rogues and undertakers, graveyard birds and thieves; thus maligned along with other crows, and all unfairly, to me these rooks are wise in myth and fact, riding the tall-tree sky beyond my window, waking up the spring with their clamorous building. In...
Duncan Forbes
Mrs Mortimer’s Podcast Men? Flowers don’t have much choice when it comes to bees, do they? Children. You get what you’re given and as for the virgin birth. Try it. The root cause of all this extinction rebellion and global warming is over-population and...
Jenny Hamlett
Masked Too early and unsteady I walk slowly along the half-empty corridor. My glasses steam as I breathe, blotting out direction signs and leaving me stranded in a boat without oars. What has happened to me? What has happened to the alert, making a joke of my hearing,...
Veronica Aaronson
Leaving Home You’re waving goodbye from the shore, smiling. I want to get off the boat, but the swell knocks me off balance and with each heave away from you I’m more seasick, homesick. I call gently to you – No fuss, you’d said. I whisper your name to calm myself as...
JanFitzGerald
The Warning A hi-vis hangs from a billboard across the road, flashing in the wind like a warning against an invisible enemy. No one’s claimed it though it’s been there for days. I retreat to the back of the house to make bread. Maybe some kid will yank the vest down...
Féilim James
Song for the Dispossessed They come to me in the silence of night, Pulsing through the embroidered sky: A young girl with blood on her thigh, Her shoulders bare under starlight. They come to me when words alight: A father of four in a Xinjiang prison, Aching,...
Rebecca Gethin
A Refuge A family who nobody knew moved into the house with no windows and a hole in the roof. There was hay to sleep on and they collected sticks from the forests on the mountain to light a fire in the middle of the room, kitchen chairs arranged in a circle of...
Linda McKenna
Learning to Swim Every woman should know how to swim, so she can navigate the treachery of land; the currents and riptides dragging her back to the crossroads of youth, paths never taken, the waxing and waning longing of streets. We stand in a line, at the tiled edge...
Belinda Cooke
Love Songs When we banter on the phone, there’s much left to uncover, and how many love songs have I left in me yet? When you humour me, I’m better than myself, how many love songs are hovering in the air? When we pull it together and get lost in our rooms, how many...
Myra Schneider
An Elephant has taken up residence on my doormat, no ordinary elephant. When the hall dims how his body, patterned in gold, shines. I whisper to myself he’s a moonchild. A flower stems from his uncurling trunk, another blooms from the leaflike lobe of his ear. His...
Robert Stein
Robert Schumann, Resident for a Year at Endenich Asylum, is Under the Supervision of Dr. Franz Richarz Last Tuesday they rolled both pianos down the hill. In the pile at the bottom, near the farm, Are sheet music, newspapers, four notebooks, The upended instruments...