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
John Greening
On the Morning of
Christmas Day it’s mild
across our ungrazed field
whose thorns and clay have yet to know a freeze.
The clouds in the east proclaim
how every wise man’s dream
of frost fair, snow and angel, is old news.
Nature, abandoned at the Pole,
feels something cracking behind her icy veil.
From that crazed mouth
a surge of blushing truth
rushes to swell the tide in our affairs,
our coal, our oil, our gas.
We sing of joy and peace
in sun and wind as each new breaker rears.
Too late the call from Greta’s green:
tooth and claw are tearing the ceremonial groyne.
You wish upon a star.
Meanwhile, behind you there
the planet’s jilted ghost wreaks her revenge:
Nature’s pantomime.
If some climatic scrim
dropped a marsh or fen, would that be change?
Still they’d stand, those ancient flats.
It’s when the next field or the one above it floods
that’s never flooded, swells
from unknown wells and spills
across your patio, the singing stops.
Silently you’ll watch
what just came in the porch
and climbs your stairs. Then Mrs Noah hopes
you have a happy Christmas, the news
crackles its last good laugh and the power goes.
Duncan Forbes
Nativity Scene
Besançon Book of Hours (15th Century)
The saddled donkey seems to be eating
Joseph’s cake-like halo or at least testing
with mouth and nostrils
whether it might be edible.
In his carpenter’s hands,
bald and bearded Joseph is holding the baby
wrapped in orange swaddling.
Seated at the feet of Mary,
Joseph wears an overskirt
of Madonna blue.
A horned cow with a pewter cowbell
on a halter round her neck
is eyeing Mary with an expression
of bovine incredulity
from behind a woven fence of wattle hurdles.
The grass is alpine green.
Apparently oblivious,
Mary is wearing a luxurious
vermilion red rug or foot-mantle
stippled with golden stars.
White-wimpled and in a yellow blouse,
she is sitting on a wooden settle,
gazing at an open book on her lap.
But what is Mary reading
with downcast eyes?
Scripture, prayers or book of hours?
As are the future and the past,
the letters are illegible from here.
More Guest Poems
Toby Buckley
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David Thompson
Circus Act some days it’s the high-wirewe balance on that thin pathunknown danger either side on others it’s the trapezeI swing to you to make the catcha moment of faith above the void today it’s contortionismI put both feet behind my headyou fit yourself into a tiny...
Maggie Brookes-Butt
The Conundrum of Proportion You try to force your arm into dolly’s dressbalance her hat like a pimple on your head,crush her cardboard-box bed with your giant toddlerbody, puzzled by further mysteries of perspective:big or close; small or far away; the way your...
Piers Cain
Another Land There is another land. A land of rockand falling water. Valleys deep in shadewith railway stations blue with rising mist. There’s a city of sunshine built on slopesthat flows down a hill in a torrent of stoneto water. Gardens hang in steps of green. In...
Julie Craig
Remembrance The pin pricks like a memory.She tries again,Almost stitching the plastic poppyTo her chest, over the heartBleeding past into present. Years have progressedBut the wound won’t heal:A scout’s compass, it pointsTo loss and leads to a monumentMarking her...
Vuyelwa Carlin
George Orwell Typing at his Desk – a Photo Cigarette (always), reek of paraffin, the flintyJura house; those poor, rotting, blood-leaking lungs: he pounds out, a year or so from death, his last bleak book – I ballsed it up…so ill… he wrote– that cracked, wheezy laugh....
Stephen Miller
Gull Island Unfamiliar shorea broken doorsill to a part-remembered landthe dismantling sun bleedsinto a rough-hewn slab of seaand seabirds scream their warningand welcoming of all that is unfixed,uncharted, unrehearsed. Demonstrative as daysavvy as bull terriersand...
John Sewell
St Lucy’s Day 1This dark year’s endis a short night’s passagefor the veteran oak. John Donne’s passionruns centuries beyondhis lover’s last embrace. Neither recompenseoff-sets our final days. But let’s light a New Yearfrom the night that’s gone,bring to...
Cathra Kelliher
Kestrel kestrel hoveringthe moment before her stoopas our first remembered falcon the field behind the cottageempty farm buildings and twilight fallinglike a gathering of ghosts shadow dropping from the fencepostthat could be a buzzardthe instant, unexpected movement...
Ralph Mold
Scilly Shore Here white foam flecks the fingersof cracked black granite,one world surrounds anotherand edges seep inwards. The thousand-mile momentum of waves,the strong, slow, shunt of currents,are broken, parted, giving uptheir gifts, blindly, unknowingly. Live...
Biljana Scott
Time has Slept Soundly in this Archipelago Time has slept soundly in this archipelagoher soft couch hollowing the hills of Hoy.A corrie for a pillow and here, two glacial sheetstheir edges scalloped, a watch-stone at their feet. What did time dream of during that long...
Susan Mackervoy
Community Wood, Evening Let loose from his lead, the elegant dog,though it is late and leaves murmur cautious forest words in the compact modern wood,speed-changing green to gold to winter black as we look down from the path and trafficpelts by, making thrumming beats...
Stephen Claughton
Kite Weather Clever you! You’ve made it workfirst time without any practice. The kite we bought for your birthdayjinks and swoops and dives, skywriting a scribbled message,which says you’re a natural. You held it up like a placard,while I attached the string,...
James Deahl
Scarlet Roses of October for Norma The sun near the harbour turns maple leavesinto stained glass windows. Sailboats head outto celebrate this Indian Summer daybefore autumn’s storms set in. Norma andI watch a freighter pass the harbour’s headon her way to Europe. All...
Joan McGavin
In Praise of the Clearers-Away who when the tree falls across the roadcome with their winches and chainsaws and hard hats;who when the nappy needs changed, the bedpan emptiedcome with sense of smell deliberately dulled;who when floods recede leaving mud floors and...