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
Lisa Lopresti
Dreary Pavements and Roads
In the dusky afternoon traffic
of a grey tarmac day
an urban fox stands by
a zebra crossing, military still.
The fox’s coat is
a scotch bonnet spice
to the drone of the day
peppering flavour to the scene.
Her brush-tailed rush
across the crossing stripes
is a slash of surprise
and elegant motion.
So alive, awake,
she alights on dancer’s feet.
A wild spirit who sees
and is often not seen.
No one slips as silent
as she, hunting hedgerow mice
and night -black bags,
crunching small bones.
Alex Barr
In Praise of Sheds
In the glow of a paraffin lamp from ‘Spick and Span’
master of my domain long ago
in the old rocking chair
that ground the floorboards in a heavy rhythm
busy with some childish occupation,
humming the ancient hymns I believed in
I watched through the open doorway
the shimmer of sunset poplars.
Such is the memory. Now in this other shed
the door is shut. My gaze is down.
In the light from a dusty window a polished beetle
pursues a pressing mission. A downy moth
flutters beside the wrapper of a tube of mints.
I raise my head and see on the grey planed uprights
ghosts of vanished brackets,
rust-flower lines of screw-heads.
Heat of the day has made the wood aromatic.
Air through knot-holes tickles the dust
and stirs the familiar scent
of creosote to remind me of my father.
The joints in the boards are staves of music
with arpeggios of knots, the rattling door
the call of a kettledrum, the whispering breeze
the echo of a far-off song.
Three narrow shelves hold mustard tins of nails,
abandoned bike lamps, labels of long dead plants.
On simple hooks are weeding tools and brushes.
I hang my griefs among them.
More Guest Poems
Mike Barlow
Blue Moon Once, after the tail-end of a hurricane had blown through the day – the roaring in the trees like a passing train and the rain berserk as it over-ran the valley – once there was this quiet October evening, two full moons in one month, two lives wrought into...
Vic Pickup
In Churchill’s The boy in the fish and chip shop once felt sad enough to slice the soft white skin on the inside of his wrist. He has a thick scar shining wide and purple like a fat worm sliding up his sleeve. You’ll see a flash of it as he deftly shovels and shakes...
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...