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
John Greening
On the Morning of
Christmas Day it’s mild
across our ungrazed field
whose thorns and clay have yet to know a freeze.
The clouds in the east proclaim
how every wise man’s dream
of frost fair, snow and angel, is old news.
Nature, abandoned at the Pole,
feels something cracking behind her icy veil.
From that crazed mouth
a surge of blushing truth
rushes to swell the tide in our affairs,
our coal, our oil, our gas.
We sing of joy and peace
in sun and wind as each new breaker rears.
Too late the call from Greta’s green:
tooth and claw are tearing the ceremonial groyne.
You wish upon a star.
Meanwhile, behind you there
the planet’s jilted ghost wreaks her revenge:
Nature’s pantomime.
If some climatic scrim
dropped a marsh or fen, would that be change?
Still they’d stand, those ancient flats.
It’s when the next field or the one above it floods
that’s never flooded, swells
from unknown wells and spills
across your patio, the singing stops.
Silently you’ll watch
what just came in the porch
and climbs your stairs. Then Mrs Noah hopes
you have a happy Christmas, the news
crackles its last good laugh and the power goes.
Duncan Forbes
Nativity Scene
Besançon Book of Hours (15th Century)
The saddled donkey seems to be eating
Joseph’s cake-like halo or at least testing
with mouth and nostrils
whether it might be edible.
In his carpenter’s hands,
bald and bearded Joseph is holding the baby
wrapped in orange swaddling.
Seated at the feet of Mary,
Joseph wears an overskirt
of Madonna blue.
A horned cow with a pewter cowbell
on a halter round her neck
is eyeing Mary with an expression
of bovine incredulity
from behind a woven fence of wattle hurdles.
The grass is alpine green.
Apparently oblivious,
Mary is wearing a luxurious
vermilion red rug or foot-mantle
stippled with golden stars.
White-wimpled and in a yellow blouse,
she is sitting on a wooden settle,
gazing at an open book on her lap.
But what is Mary reading
with downcast eyes?
Scripture, prayers or book of hours?
As are the future and the past,
the letters are illegible from here.
More Guest Poems
B. Anne Adriaens
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Graham Mort
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Regi Claire
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Christopher M James
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Nicola Warwick
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Robert Stein
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Frances Sackett
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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
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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...