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
Carolyn McCurdie
To Cleave
This morning a sheer, immaculate sky
was bisected horizon to horizon
by interlacing white and blue threads of a cloud formation,
delicate, curling filaments, intricate weavings
that bound east to west. And held their breath.
I stood at my back door, thinking feather, then quill.
I tried to find some image to hold the loveliness in my mind
and noticed, in this search for words, a clunk of loss.
I looked for thickness, a spine in the feather,
a sharpness of the quill that I could name as nib.
It was sort of a game, but to win was to miss.
As if I’d been shown a poem in unfamiliar, lyrical script
whose mystery might have dusted my skin, my lips, like pollen drift,
and invited some tongue of wordlessness to rise, to sip.
But quick, with a neat sticky label, I’d grabbed. To own.
To keep. A sort of self-caging. Offered a sky alive with
the possible wild, the infinite strange, I’d looked for a nib,
found only an ink-flick of grief.
A crick in my neck. Obtuseness sour in my gut.
I breathed in, breathed out.
When I looked up, the cloud had loosened,
tendrils unlooping, its coherence becoming unnameable open,
unnameable new.
And this. A cloud poem shifting, finding something less certain.
About stillness at my back door? Smallness? Perhaps about staying.
Daljit Nagra
parka
your brother’s made friends with two boys down the road
who are your own background
with their parents from the villages in Punjab
they’re in his year and they’ve been mixing languages
till they giggle their heads off
slipping from rugged London to farmer’s Punjabi
sat sri akal mate – how’s yor old man, mate
he’s all teek – thanks for aaskin dohst
they’ve invented a new speak and you’re in awe
cos you won’t mix suitcases like that with Nigel
your dad, a champion wrestler destined
for the Olympics – except it was amateur stuff,
was told to come over here
for the Sterling slog in Bison’s concrete factory
he’s always at work early and back late
overtime either end and at home half-cut
he’s not gone yet and loiters in his work boots
then empties two raw eggs in two glasses each
and makes you both swallow them down
when you gag, he says you’re both koories, girls
he stands over your brother, who’s older than you
by two years, and says that he’s not to walk
with those boys anymore, one’s a carpenter
caste and the other’s from the cobblers
he won’t have word getting out that juts, landowners
are mixing with riffraff
so when they knock for your brother
the shoulders of your dad narrow the frame
as he tells those ten year olds not to mix with his son
their tiny heads shiver in the hoods of their parkas
everyone knows your dad’s the best arm wrestler
in the factories – they help their own dads
by not walking with your brother again
More Guest Poems
Margaret Wilmot
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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...
Timothy Houghton
Hummingbirds Some people say not to worry about the air Some people never had experience with Air. —Talking Heads It’s the small talk of wings brushing windows, vibing the casita. The circle of four fake flowers is a compass, a fraught blood-colored universe. I wait...
Ann Gibson
Archaeologists’ Handfasting at Stonehenge Against wind and rain, in pre-dawn dark the wedding party troops towards the stones. Pendragon, vestments flapping, leads guests in waterproofs and hiking boots. An hour’s access to the site granted, we’re still stopped at the...
Leonard Lambert
Dog Heaven ....these beings wholly dependent on us whom we have helped lift themselves to gain a soul, but for which there is no heaven... (Letters, Rainer Maria Rilke) Rilke was wrong: .....dogs have their own Heaven, no soul required. As if Devotion were the domain...
Merryn Williams
Red White and Blue When I drive past an elder in full flower on June roads, on some national holiday, I yearn for its distinctive scent and colour. There was a poet who saw cow parsley not as a weed, but a luxuriant drift of pure colour, white as you need to get. The...
Michael Gittins
Translation of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) The Wild Rose-Bush How it stands there in the gloaming of a rainy evening; young and pure; offering its shoots with outstretched arms and yet in deep rose-essence, very sure; the nascent blossoms, open here and there, each...
Veronica Beedham
The Old Empire Between Dreamland and the Amusement Arcade, Art-deco’s brown-gold, the foyer – polished wood, bakelite and glass – lit up so you could easily walk in, the usherette in chiaroscuro gloom, ready to take you down with her single torch beam to your numbered...