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
Jim C. Wilson
Swans At Night
On the wildest night of the year’s beginning,
the park’s a moor, the pond a heaving ocean.
Like hailstones, stars soar past our heads;
the trees are stripped by the shrieking gale.
My eyes stream and my face feels stretched
and I worry about tomorrow. Until,
three areas of wavering light. ‘The swans,’
you say. But it’s dark. I have my doubts.
But the three vague shapes begin to gleam:
It’s them on the bridge, with their necks
folded back and heads half-buried in wings.
Sleeping swans as still as stones, and white
as falling snow. We grow closer.
a head rears up; perfect feathers ruffle.
We slip by into the wind. Beyond the trees
the orange lights wait, and cars are everywhere.
Tonight we’ll sleep as the fireplace howls
and the dead come drifting by again. But
in the light we’ll feed the swans, see them glide,
so white with grace, like galleons bearing gifts.
Damaris West
Into this Breathing World
Found in hallowed soil,
his scoliotic spine strung
loosely like a rosary
(one shoulder higher than the other;
five foot eight but would have seemed
much shorter) he’d been struck
by many men so each
could claim the fatal blow.
History has told of his unhorsing.
Mounted on his courser,
no terrain however steep
would have defeated him.
He could have gone where no roads go,
however crooked he became,
if he had lived.
He would have fought
to reach completion
like the gibbous moon.
He would have sought
to be compared with trees
whose curvature
in bole and bough is grace.
More Guest Poems
Douglas Cole
The Lighthouse Keeper In this season he knowswe are smaller than wind,as the storm blast singsthrough the boarded glass. He opens his doorto the sting and stab of rain,making his way as he leansunder the arc-lamp light. In the radio house he listensto distress codes a...
Cathra Kelliher
we sat holding the lamb we sat holding the lambRichard and Ithe field soft about uscold coming on below the ash treesand the farm buildingssilent as flint through the arrow slits how slight it wasand how meagre the pullof its miniature mouth on my fingera smear of...
Anthony Lawrence
The Moonlit Lakes of John Atkinson Grimshaw have all the hallmarks of ice, when seen througha hawthorn hedge or drystone wall,and you’d be forgiven, the way a witness,driven to description, not of a man,but of animals on the surface of the moon,is forgiven for seeing...
Patrick Osada
Rooks Each evening they appear at duskin ones and twos –return from distant foraging.Flapping untidy wings in laboured flight,they circle,gathering as a cawing group,heading for their roost in Hazelwood. Today, nest building in the tallest treesthat screen the...
Yasmin A. Hussain
Treasure Chests Dad decides to give us pocket money.Mum decides it’s better saved. She buys tinmoney boxes with painted timber panels,crossbands of brass and a central padlock. She holds out the chests as cash is passedfrom Dad to us into the slots. Eventually,mum...
Leo Boix
A Latin American Sonnet CXCVI In a dense forest of the Gran Chaco stretch, ‘the hunting land’,Argentina’s largest known jaguar–the Qaramta–is on high patrol,it’s after giant anteaters, tapirs, capybaras, peccaries and standscrouched down by the riverbed, alert,...
Margaret Wilmot
The Butterfly Effect for Nick and his butterfly I heard Monarch for Monach as a sealrolled high in the curve of a wave, and marvelled that sea-battered islands far west of Scotlandshould share a name with butterfliesin another Far West. Do they still build cocoons in...
Anna Barker
When I think of my body as a crow We slide together:my flesh, your feather, your jet eye, the haw you draw across in sleep,the patient keel of your sternum,the steel of your rib your beak to stitch the vane, the silken ley,the tap of talons on glass,the hollow bone...
Jonathan Greenhause
Our Shrinking Plot of Earth Blue whales bathe in our birdbathcradling the Atlantic, our chilly attic the outer atmosphere,its drop-ceiling a cloak of altocumuli. Our footfallsextinguish species; Our breaths brew cyclonic storms;Each of our verses is a new...
Edward Ragg
Final Diner at the Banquet of Dreams Eight months of English sun and rain sifting through the shadows of towering cumulus billowing like ships’ sails in the northern wind have composted your remains in the uncaring earth. Never had imagination so vividly and swiftly...
Jennifer Johnson
Exposure So, you live in a magnificent duck house, a five-foot Swedish home complete with door, windows and roof, floating on a rich man’s pond. You kept that quiet, never mentioned it any of the times you quacked with us pretending you were no different. You just...
Bren Simmers
Once Beloved You hadn’t been diagnosed yet; days you couldn’t get out of bed. Took a semester off to transition from class three rapids to chronically ill. You’d make a meal in the back kitchen, row of single panes overlooking a raggedy tenant’s garden. Table pushed...
Steve Noyes
Mars Low in the southern sky, a coppery glint, Mars, planet of war. Across that distance a memory sifts in, of the Juan de Fuca Strait on a still evening, when an aircraft carrier, the Ronald Reagan, half a mile long, slate-grey, was sent by the Empire to demonstrate...
Nicki Griffin
Streetwise The pretty street is lined with gas lights convincing in their Victorian guise throwing down a mantle of respectability. Nothing to see in the shadows you know and that thing you noticed that slithered away wasn’t there. You can trust me. Look how the...
Owen Bullock
Mousehole you ease out of the chimney walk down the lane fall out of dark cloud into a boat slide from blue shimmer in a fix of sun over water level the roof of the house with your chest heave the dinghy onto the harbour wall smudge eyes with raindrops collapse onto...