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
Mike Everley
Soul Music
3 – Swallows
My uncle and I flew paper swallows from the high bedroom window. They caught the lifting wind, drifted above the narrow road and pointed metal railings that had somehow escaped the Spitfire Fund, into the small park with its swings, roundabout and curving metal slide. Origami birds designed centuries before man took to the sky. I make them still. But now they fly over a far different world where computer obsessed children view them with indifference. There is something therapeutic about working with paper: fold left, press along the crease, fold right, press along the crease until the skin’s impression is absorbed and incorporated into the structure, part paper part person. Unlike merely pressing a key or moving a joystick on a video game. In Ancient Egypt, birds were thought to carry the souls of the dead. I fly many swallows now, one for each of the lost. They soar high over fields lush with grass, towards the waiting arms of the sea. Do they carry the dead souls of family and friends? Or are they carriers of my hopes and memories, riding the wind of imagination to a better place? I fly my swallows for those who are gone. Who will fly a swallow for me?
Emma Simon
Lullaby
I want a slow horse. Those heavy-hoofed kinds
that used to drag a plough across a field
or haul the beer drays through the town.
I’d sit up high, proud as an empress
with reins in hand, an easy sway of hips
rollicking like hills from side-to-side.
We’d walk the daylong lanes, breathe in
the smell of mouldering hay and apple pulp.
The heartbeat pace of metal shoes on stone.
A broad support of back. I’d press my cheek
close to the fuzz of muscled neck, wind fingers
through his mane, tether myself at night.
Through plodding dark I’d whisper stories
in his velvet ears, of fabled beasts
looming from a golden age of horses:
the fairground strength of Suffolk Punch,
Dutch Draft, a trusted Clydesdale,
sing battle songs of brave Percheron,
the long-gone jousting Great Horse.
Pick a steady path home through the stars,
held by the cradling shoulders of the Shire.
More Guest Poems
Kevin Kiely
Shall I Compare Thee to a Winter’s Day Thank you, Will Shakespeare shall I compare thee to a winter’s day thou art more cold and icy than the snows rough words come clanging as the pay off, red hot anger in your face shows season’s sun as frozen; that’s your lot – nor...
Doris Corti
Through the window Early morning, a small glimpse of cobalt blue, light through a veil of mist and glint of pearl on frosty paths. Silver tipped, the larches gleam in this white light. Strong impression of the sky widening; here and there tints of mauve, a flush of...
Robin Lindsay Wilson
Love and Quantum Theory Nerve end memories of you flicker until the light from so many daybreaks dissolves the searching iris and lens and my flesh edges from its purpose revealing basic bone and mineral. How do we promise everlasting love when only sockets in skulls...
Virginia Betts
Two Benches I never imagined this. Outside a blank, white room, with its blank, white walls. Inside, the clock unwinds; seconds drip steadily down the line, waiting for nature to call time. On a cold metallic bench I wait, suspended; Stop-motion faces speed by;...
Joan McGavin
The Look I’m thinking of the look a woman gave as the mudslide rushed towards her and she turned her face upwards and threw her baby clear. I’m thinking what the last person who saw her saw in her face. No photo fixes it. No artist had time to paint that look....
Patrick Osada
Sunflower Down at the pub, the rumours had soon spread : our local farmer’s selling off his land. When goat-man left and pheasant farm shut down, we realised there was truth in what was said. Soon, other tenants left their grazing land – moved horses on, their meadows...
Jonathan Steffen
Portuguese Churches They tower on the hilltops of the far Reconquest, Holding up their crosses to the heavens – Tall centuries of flinty faith Piled high to fill the sky with their conviction. Once new, once bright, once bold, They groan now under their own history,...
Avaughan Watkins
The Beekeeper She is veiled, white gowned, holding by its neck a metal rooster that clucks with smoke. Under the cottage cheese blossom there’s a fae circle of wooden homes. With a gloved hand she snaps the propolis under the gabled roof; a behemoth bride revealing a...
Sheila Spense
How to know a bumblebee Try to draw each golden stripe and silver-veined wing each jointed leg and claw, the furry bee-ness of it busy on sun-drenched lavender. Listen to the bombination and buzz of it its hum and hear the voice of summer.
Gill Learner
Let it Be Like This The smell will arrive first – ylang ylang, perhaps, or sandalwood. It will be followed by a cloud of a colour never seen before: this will surround me, block the light. Faintly at first I’ll hear music – violins and cellos at the start, then, as...
Samantha Carr
Moon Landing Some say that it was a hoax, but I remember every moment of when The Men arrived. They set down their craft upon my soft craters. No permission to land requested. Claimed me as though a flag could limit the gravity of my moonlight. A crescent shaped...
Matt Bryden
Rich and Poor in the Underworld I should choose, so I might live on Earth, to serve as the hireling of another, some landless man with hardly enough to live on, rather than be lord over all the dead that have perished. Odyssey 11, 489 – 491 See this tanned...
Gill McEvoy
Ivy Wreaths are Multiplying by the River in the Woods This is a lonely path, and that’s what I prefer: a chance to watch the dipper in the stream, the deer come down to drink, the wren that bobs along the bank. But lately all my pleasure’s spoiled by ivy wreaths hung...
Owen Gallagher
‘And Yourself?’ ‘Donegal,’ I say. I see the stone and oak pier, Inishboffin, Inishdooey and Tory Island, seals sunbathing on the sandbanks, the sky, blue as a Greek door. I imagine you carrying me, in a hold-all across the dunes to Falcarragh Strand, and then...
Wendy French
Truth The air asks the wind about the silence it carries and the wind scours the mountain for a reply but the mountain looks down on the departing river the river that carries the stone to the fading sea’s edge the stone does not speak of the weight that it carries....