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
Jan FitzGerald
Daffodil Bulbs
I could stare at these tubs of dirt all day,
waiting for the miracle.
This is where I buried them,
swaddled in their papery skins
now wintering in a secret hideaway
like swollen nodes of sleep.
I envy their dark cocoons of privacy.
One more change of season
and these earthlings from inner space
will send up green antennae.
For now, inside each one, a mothership is working –
taking on nutrients, storing energy,
producing offspring for renewal –
ready for the final booster thrust.
Little heads of white, orange, yellow,
floating in the air.
Christopher Palmer
The Sides of an Obelisk
Three thousand five hundred are the years
I’ve travelled, past all my known forebears
past several kings named Henry
outbreaks of the plague there, and there
to be pinpointed along time’s gradient
where creatures are shaped into language
and perception carved into stone
becomes reliable memoir.
I look for my name
enclosed within a cartouche
ask if anything awaits the common man
in the afterlife.
A glimpse away and it vanishes
to a compass needle showing pagans
the quickest way to heaven
or a candle, reflecting its many-storied faces
and I’m a moth, lost
in more than a million days of light.
Line 1 paraphrases a line from Amy Crutchfield’s ‘Tower’.
More Guest Poems
Rachel Mann
England, Ice Fixed, White with Rage From a train, always train, acres of whiteness, and I watchPast or future, fields of time, seen/unseen, fields of it, the presentRefuses, I only want it more, and gods of modest means,Not first rankers, not famous ones with...
Philip Gross
Small Rain, the Sound of Breathing The way a little too much cautioncreaks the floorboards more than clumsiness –so the rain, tonight, small spatters, all around the house… The way I ease the body-weightof last night’s sleep to the edge of the bed…Its cartilages...
Philip Dunkerley
The Repair Shop Give me, please, this evening hourof rest, let me sit safely herewatching the show, alone, at home,in the quiet of this room,others busy, nearby, elsewhere,as another day ends. I have chosen this programmefrom all those that tell of the past,carefully...
Paula Sankelo
We Learned That Everything Drifts Green and Purple in the Barents Sea almost everything: R/V Lance wasgrounded deep on an unlucky reef we heard Mayday and drove to assistancesleepless the entire sunlit night. Humming a shanty we wrote for the rescue– our captain...
Tytti Heikkinen
Big Morning in Rome In the hot magenta of a dark alley,a photoallergic inamorato sees the lady of his lifeand wants nothing more.He rushes through porticos and tourist crowdswho wave positive cardio imagesin the chiaroscuro of endless fog. The lady waits on the...
Martyn Crucefix
Salisbury (short let) In the year of the election, in early June,the third year of the war, the four of uswoken – we thought – by the whinnyingof horses; architecture with a sense of irony:we discover the best (least obstructed)view of the famous cathedral is fromthe...
Steve Denehan
A Poem from My Mother to My Father The way you standcrooked, stoopedin doorwaysunsure of where, why, what the way you asked mejust last weekif we knew each other the way I have to dress youwash youtell youthe time, the day, the season the way you look at melast...
Elisabeth Murawski
To Grieve Like Kollwitz That night in mid-January,I prayed to the Godof waiting rooms, swimming for my life,and yours.I can still summon that fear,waking before dawnwith tears and cries for help,a litanyof the impoverished. The silencesurrounded uslike an absence I...
Mike Everley
Soul Music3 – 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...
Emma Simon
Lullaby I want a slow horse. Those heavy-hoofed kindsthat used to drag a plough across a fieldor haul the beer drays through the town. I’d sit up high, proud as an empresswith reins in hand, an easy sway of hipsrollicking like hills from side-to-side. We’d walk the...
Jodi Cadenhead
The Best is Yet to Come Everyone agreed it was the polar caps,that went first, followed bythe Colorado River and the birds – pretty much, all of them,not to mention the pandas, the monarch butterfliesand the green sea turtles. But what really got our attention,were...
Sam Cassels
Anvils I have this dreamof anvils droppingfrom a quiet sky. A scene in a B-moviefrom the Cold War erain glorious black and white. A heavenly protestfrom the gods of waras they lay down their tools. A Dali paintingof shadows fallingon the face of the earth. Or just a...
Jennifer Johnson
Satisfaction Sometimes, it is the common things that give satisfaction,such as chopping onions, peppers and tomatoesdespite me rarely enjoying cooking apart from the result,sharing food with the one who brings some real point to life,one who lifts me above the...
David Sergeant
A Winter Morning Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm! (Lear) My heart forgets …(Burns, ‘A Winter Night’) The globe has got its change on and frostthe artificer has strolledmadly through the world with a...
Marjory Woodfield
She Sews the Starsafter a quilt by Harriet Powers Harriet takes strips of calico,old dungarees. Stitches storiesto warm her children. Job prays for his enemies. Moses lifts up the serpentin the wilderness. A dark day in May. The stars fall.In the Garden of Eden, God’s...