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
Denise Bennett
The Table
You made the coffee table long before
I was on the scene, aged thirteen, a term’s work
in the carpentry class, as yet the names
of your wife and children uncarved in your heart;
young to master the music of your tools:
bit and brace, mallet, plane, drill and chisel,
to learn the skill, mystery of the grain;
to sand and saw, precision of the dovetail.
When later, our children began to walk
and fall, used it for support, you buttered
their bruises, covered corners with padded cloth;
turned your strong hands to fort and doll’s crib.
I never thought, you said yesterday,
of a wife and family, how it might be used.
For fifty years it has graced our sitting room
felt the rough and smooth of our lives,
lustre and shine. Quiet evenings we sit now
at our coffee table, your gifted hands in mine.
Fred Beake
Spring Returns
By the narrow high-hedged lane to Holne;
and then up over the moor to see the snowdrops at St Raphael’s!
The gale rocks us; and the rain slaps the windscreen,
but you can glimpse black rocks of tor and combe.
Then down Three in One to the valley of the river;
and the storm suddenly pauses.
The river is beyond its banks, a great seething white.
Wild bulls of Bashan have beset me round.’ slips into my mind.
But will the snowdrops be out at St Raphael’s?
It is what we have come for. They may well not be there.
Sure enough, the notice says, ‘Snowdrops out next week.’
Disappointment! But we pull on to the gravel.
We may as well get out and taste the calm of this wild ancient place.
One rather posh car is already there.
The well drenched owner changes his shoes, and says. ‘If you have come
for the snowdrops they will be coming later.’
‘We can still visit the chapel.’ I mutter back, embarrassed.
But as soon as we open the gate snowdrops are visible.
We feel joy, and mockery at one who would not look.
Just a few yards in the snowdrops are multitudinous.
More Guest Poems
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...
Elaine Jarvest Miller
Like Sunrise My uncle said it could come at any time, the knock on the door. The policeman, the waiting car, the high-speed journey through pre-war London. That night there was no time, no time for the usual procedures. They took him straight to the hospital bed, to...
Hilary Hares
Daily Bread Based on the words of a Ukranian farmer, 5 March 2022 We grow the wheat, give it, for free, to the men who drive the lorries. The men who drive the lorries deliver it, for free, to the bakers of Kyiv. The bakers of Kyiv bake it, for free, into bread for...
Polly Walshe
Painting You There is a city in your face, I see it in the shadows this fierce light creates. You build a new one every day – Babylon was there, a shimmer of Jerusalem And many a smaller place. They will all fall but only one of them will rise again. Are your cities...
Lola Haskins
The Plants in a Skipton Concrete Yard The chives are xenophobes. They dig their roots in deeper every year and have taken over their tub. The courgette is an exchange student from France. She is blossoming as hard as she can. She has always wanted to be a ballerina,...
Jeremy Robson
The Race The others had quit the track, I had no choice, I had to step up now. It was like a fight. I grabbed the baton in my shaking hand and clutched it tight. I hadn’t trained for this, and the race was tough, circuit after circuit on rough uneven ground. A jeering...
Penelope Shuttle
in real time a day comes when you don’t walk by the sea despite the lovely air of May but go back to the hotel to sleep all afternoon in a room gorging on sun a time comes when you don’t jump up to dance but watch from a corner as couples sway like wheat in the field...
Lynne Hjelmgaard
Night Journey: On the Greyhound Bus I trusted the soft-spoken driver, the sound of his foot on the pedal, humming of the engine once we reached the highway, cocooned by other passengers, coaxing me into a dreamless sleep. When we were further south, past midnight, we...