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
Piers Cain
Half life
It all depends which way you turn in the half
light, in the space between day and night
or between one year and another.
It affects how much your eye adapts, and how dark
or bright the sky you face, how soon or late
for you the night draws in.
And when you walk in the hollow dark at dawn
you feel the expanse of the air around you while a glimpse
of light turns the foreground ocean grey.
Why did you choose the heaving bulk of the hill,
the patchy dun of the paving stones in the lane,
the muzzy form of the car in the car park?
You who’d always loved the trees and fields
why did you walk towards the failing light?
Matt Gilbert
A Solar Diversion
The sun slants low. Rays point west,
refracting from the roofs of oversized
parked cars on Manor Mount, forcing you
to squint, walking down the slope towards
the station. Preceded by long shadows,
bouncing to the rhythm of their owner’s feet,
you are trailed by your own. The suburbs are
a dancefloor. Commuters outlined by morning
shine. A light fiercer than any nightclub laser.
The dazzling energy of our local star: 93
million miles off, sending warmth and still in full
possession of the unthinking power to obliterate us all.
More Guest Poems
Greta Stoddart
A Glass of Water So many ways of looking at a glass of water – why is one clearly not enough? Because there are many ways to look and it’s a different kind of sustenance we’re after when we look at a glass of water and maybe there’s no such thing as failure when we...
Rosie Jackson
Grief: A User’s Guide Follow the instructions carefully. Do not use your grief for purposes other than the one for which it is intended. Extreme caution must be taken. Lift your grief, do not drag. If you find any resistance, cut into pieces. Gently shake if...
Doreen Hinchliffe
Memento Mori at an exhibition of Victorian photographs of the dead Posed and dressed in Sunday best, their heads clamped tight in a metal vice, their bodies propped on stands or chairs, they stare at us across the years and fix us with their unreal eyes, inviting us...
Geoffrey Winch
In this Silence To her the silence had been in itself a prayer, the deepest, the holiest, the most illuminating. T. F. Powys: Mister Tasker’s Gods its utter depth and width can only leave one standing on this canyon’s rim entirely without speech its walls stacked so...
Barbara Cumbers
Of all the stars, the loveliest ... Sappho: Fragments on love and desire ... are the Pleiades for they are blue like the sparkles of ice in the coldness of air for they cluster like buds of angelica for the glow that surrounds them is the birthplace of stars for they...
Isabel S. Miles
Sunflower Potatoes, cherry trees and wheat begin in darkness, as sunflowers do, rooted in dank clay, eating ochre, seeking light. With brush for bow and canvases for instruments, in colours only he had vision clean enough to see, he played sonatas filled with blossoms...
Estill Pollock
In Places We Invent In places we invent, cities not cities In ways we knew, in our little understanding Of structures and remorse, where stations prosper From years of long cold, or in savannahs Dry winds strip breathless, our new lives Printed veils of fabrics, tools...
John Gosslee
Below the Night Sky and Blazing My bones hollow, but I don’t grow feathers like a good bird. The village torches mark the trails from the foothills into the rows of shops, onto the box-heavy-delivery-truck-filled roads, the scabs of progress flicker under the...
Robert Dorsett
Voice for the War Refugees The suffering of others is always a foreign language. They speak, leave gaps for others to fill. Keep meaning close, crisp and dangerous. Packed into camps, huddled behind wire, they bandy facts into lies, clench fear into a pause. And speak...
Eleanor Westwood
Breaking News 16.3.22 the child, too excited for school the husband, heart in his guts twisting the woman kissing her parents goodbye the passport bearing her name in her own hands her sweat impregnating the cover joins the man whose family wait for him negotiators...