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
Carolyn McCurdie
To Cleave
This morning a sheer, immaculate sky
was bisected horizon to horizon
by interlacing white and blue threads of a cloud formation,
delicate, curling filaments, intricate weavings
that bound east to west. And held their breath.
I stood at my back door, thinking feather, then quill.
I tried to find some image to hold the loveliness in my mind
and noticed, in this search for words, a clunk of loss.
I looked for thickness, a spine in the feather,
a sharpness of the quill that I could name as nib.
It was sort of a game, but to win was to miss.
As if I’d been shown a poem in unfamiliar, lyrical script
whose mystery might have dusted my skin, my lips, like pollen drift,
and invited some tongue of wordlessness to rise, to sip.
But quick, with a neat sticky label, I’d grabbed. To own.
To keep. A sort of self-caging. Offered a sky alive with
the possible wild, the infinite strange, I’d looked for a nib,
found only an ink-flick of grief.
A crick in my neck. Obtuseness sour in my gut.
I breathed in, breathed out.
When I looked up, the cloud had loosened,
tendrils unlooping, its coherence becoming unnameable open,
unnameable new.
And this. A cloud poem shifting, finding something less certain.
About stillness at my back door? Smallness? Perhaps about staying.
Daljit Nagra
parka
your brother’s made friends with two boys down the road
who are your own background
with their parents from the villages in Punjab
they’re in his year and they’ve been mixing languages
till they giggle their heads off
slipping from rugged London to farmer’s Punjabi
sat sri akal mate – how’s yor old man, mate
he’s all teek – thanks for aaskin dohst
they’ve invented a new speak and you’re in awe
cos you won’t mix suitcases like that with Nigel
your dad, a champion wrestler destined
for the Olympics – except it was amateur stuff,
was told to come over here
for the Sterling slog in Bison’s concrete factory
he’s always at work early and back late
overtime either end and at home half-cut
he’s not gone yet and loiters in his work boots
then empties two raw eggs in two glasses each
and makes you both swallow them down
when you gag, he says you’re both koories, girls
he stands over your brother, who’s older than you
by two years, and says that he’s not to walk
with those boys anymore, one’s a carpenter
caste and the other’s from the cobblers
he won’t have word getting out that juts, landowners
are mixing with riffraff
so when they knock for your brother
the shoulders of your dad narrow the frame
as he tells those ten year olds not to mix with his son
their tiny heads shiver in the hoods of their parkas
everyone knows your dad’s the best arm wrestler
in the factories – they help their own dads
by not walking with your brother again
More Guest Poems
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...
Hannah Linden
The Woodcutter’s House from Wolf Daughter Now the wolf is dead, dissected into pieces and the knife has been cleaned and put back into the drawer. No more dwelling on it he said. Take some pills and put a smile on your face, no need for red capes now. What was your...
Paul Surman
Sparrowhawk You have come to rest on a stave of the low wooden fence yards from our window, a desperate look of tired ferocity in your eye. Next to our neighbour's forsythia, your feather cloak's duller shine. You look haughty, like an old nobility fallen on hard...
Frank McMahon
Saving Byzantium Every time he asks, is this allowed? They do not paint God’s face, our enemies. They are ocean, plague, unanswered swords, surely God must love them more? They tell him: this is a settled question and this is your commission, The Triumph of Orthodoxy....
Bert Molsom
Inside the house I am safe, all I want is here. These people tell me – what I think is right. They are my family, think like me, speak like me, behave like me. Outside it doesn’t work as my family say it must. Outside is danger, weakness. We know what is right, the...
Dinah Livingstone
Rose Garden I see things in black and white, he says. He means he sees them plainly with a will proudly to describe the truth in prose and strip away the fantasy and frill. Red rose of passion, yellow rose of peace, the flaming orange and soft violet stir feelings as...
Louise Walker
Jug after Vermeer’s Milkmaid She knows to hold it steady with her left hand, as her right hand tilts the heavy jug – too much milk and the children won’t eat the pudding of yesterday’s bread, crumbled ready on the blue cloth, the Virgin’s colour, like her apron, yet...
Samuel Prince
Agent is Typing... In order to help, I need to get you to the right person, a few questions now, to confirm your identity. Where shall I send the transcript of our conversation? We’ve all got hologram thoughts, biases, perversions, you may feel you were born in the...