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
Roberta Dewa
Edward Burra: Never Tell Anybody Anything
In the end
I gave up on people, my layered clowns,
my boxers’ lips, my stroke-struck faces. Instead
I painted their standing gravestones, the long slicks
of their tracks across the landscape. Sometimes,
despite my best attempts, their limbs
would break the soil: the ricket
legs of pylons, the bloom of mouths
on the fronts of trucks, soft bones splitting
the taut skin of a grey snake river. Slowly,
while my hand thinned and dried around the brush,
I rendered down their bodies into great stones
whose roots leaked out into a silent
landscape.
Then there was only what
there had always been. The paint, the paper
laid out flat along the table. Hardboard
at the window, shuttering the populated view.
The water in the glass jar, darkening.
Edward Burra (1905-1976) was known for his vivid paintings of the 1920s and later cosmopolitan society. In later life his health confined him to painting in his room.
Martin Reed
Red Hares
When I think of the hare
some raggedy, angular grace
races through my mind.
It comes unlooked for
when chatting of nothing,
rounding an August cornfield hedge,
up and away across sharp stubble,
square to the ground in an upright scurry,
arcing its route to distant shadows.
And it may be years
before I see one again,
coming to us down a lane,
picking a way before slowed traffic,
high banks lowering on either side.
It stops and then comes on again,
a remembered wilderness in its eye,
bringing back the hares of childhood
under pylons, fizzing cables.
Before sun sank and ghosted the field,
we squinted to catch a final glimpse,
their run over hummocks of fiery light.
More Guest Poems
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...
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,...