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
Judith Wozniak
Back to Nature
i.m. J.S.
You liked to sleep out
at the edge of your garden
under a scatter of stars
tucked into your bivouac
on a bed of leaves
soothed by a soft breeze
drift over the South Downs
the smell of honeysuckle
after rain the rustle
of hedgehogs in the compost
to wake with birdsong
your face spritzed with dew
on the other side of time
I see you walk The Lane
with Edward Thomas
in your beloved Steep
under silent beech and yew
the scent of wild rose
sounds of song-thrush
a distant cuckoo calling
the bees hum the hiss
of wind in meadow-grass
a swift rising over
a shiver of aspens
or are you exploring
another galaxy
held in moonlight
Robert Leach
Horse
A pool of shadow
Shapes the lonely place
Where the old horse stands.
He shakes his head.
Remote from
Cows, sheep, people,
It seems farming proceeds
Around, beyond him.
His tufty fetlocks ape
The head-heavy cow parsley,
Hair grass, oval sedge
Unheeded at the field’s edge.
He’s not far from the farmyard,
Where a stick-figure person
Strides towards the dark-doored
Corrugated iron shed.
Across the sloping meadow
There’s a splattering of stones,
Yellow-shadowy,
Birds twittering and flittering,
And sheep, clusters of them,
Bleating, munching, staring
At the comforts
Of the known home farm.
A fidgety hoof
Scuffs the bank, the long head sways,
And he stands, spectre of
What’s always far away.
More Guest Poems
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...
Rex Sweeny
The silent place Two sets of heavy doors, solid as weightlifters’ shoulders as they roll on their hinges noiseless apart from a small cough of protest or welcome and then you’re in the space: the grand rectangular mural-encrusted incense-hinting carved varnished...
Rosemary Jenkinson
After Daniel McColgan’s Murder His body lies on the pad Under the ash, next to a blackthorn, In the soft hollow of the devil’s punchbowl (His dad says the devil only lurks in dark corners). Ravens stalk his head And tatted flowers creep round The braeface of the caves...