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

D. A. Hickman

D. A. Hickman

The Dreamer’s Song

We wish, we worry, we long to conquer things,
but is the world stage ours to impose on like

perpetual star gazers, never satisfied or content
with a spinning planet that needs our care?

What is it about the wild storm inside? Fuelling
our edginess, we seldom look below impetuous feet

to notice the ground that nourishes with food, beauty,
colour, intrigue, adventure, and, yes, survival. Bogged

down in myriad issues, doom and gloom prophecies,
some spew frustration and angst in their wake like

fearful creatures clambering for the spotlight. But a
fresh and generous outlook could turn things around:

bring the world into graceful balance until it resembled
an elegant slow dance.

Anthony Head

Anthony Head

Angels

My Angels don’t answer. They never do. Sources disagree
on how many each of us has, but often have I pleaded
for mine to show themselves or leave at least some evidence.
Never a whisper or sign, no sudden ruffling air on a windless
day, no bright light at the end of the bed, not even a feather.

Am I abandoned then, uncared for? Has it always been this way?
I listen to the chat-show voyants claiming your favour, but how
you live untouched among the victims of hurricane and wildfire,
in the aftermath of rampage, they never say, or what the guardians
of rapists are up to, how many billions you are, if like us you sleep.

I wait here with an open mind, an open heart, but there are times I feel
I’m sinking, flailing in this heavy swell of silence as night closes in.
Find me, Angels; somehow speak. Let me know the day will come
you guide my tainted spirit to the light. (Then I can erase this poem.)

More Guest Poems

Polly Walshe

Painting You There is a city in your face, I see it in the shadows this fierce light creates. You build a new one every day – Babylon was there, a shimmer of Jerusalem And many a smaller place. They will all fall but only one of them will rise again. Are your cities...

Lola Haskins

The Plants in a Skipton Concrete Yard The chives are xenophobes. They dig their roots in deeper every year and have taken over their tub. The courgette is an exchange student from France. She is blossoming as hard as she can. She has always wanted to be a ballerina,...

Jeremy Robson

The Race The others had quit the track, I had no choice, I had to step up now. It was like a fight. I grabbed the baton in my shaking hand and clutched it tight. I hadn’t trained for this, and the race was tough, circuit after circuit on rough uneven ground. A jeering...

Penelope Shuttle

in real time a day comes when you don’t walk by the sea despite the lovely air of May but go back to the hotel to sleep all afternoon in a room gorging on sun a time comes when you don’t jump up to dance but watch from a corner as couples sway like wheat in the field...

Lynne Hjelmgaard

Night Journey: On the Greyhound Bus I trusted the soft-spoken driver, the sound of his foot on the pedal, humming of the engine once we reached the highway, cocooned by other passengers, coaxing me into a dreamless sleep. When we were further south, past midnight, we...

Colin Bell

20/20 The wall was warm and red it hummed with bees a private place away from the schoolhouse. That’s how it was before glasses natural Impressionism knowing nothing of art or hard lines. Then concave lenses in plastic frames were like the leg irons on my friend who...

Lenora Steele

Day Dreaming It is mid-January. The forecasters are forecasting snow. A woman is lying atop of her made-up bed. There’s a single electric candle in the window, a left-over from Christmas. Across the street in the growing dark, the neighbours’ lights come on and a...

Mantz Yorke

A Gambler’s Lot For now, he’s got water – enough to keep the grass green – though no permit to sprinkle his lawn in daytime’s heat. Las Vegas as a whole is less accommodating: to save water, grass is being gouged from its medians and roundabouts and further...

Lori Drummond-Mundal

Rooks Over Mariupol Rooks raise a complaint, but cannot erase the blinding mist. I live in the mist of a distant land. The sun is veiled yet I know it exists. Raucous rooks tear from branch tips, black into squall. Tempest of wings rip at seams, imagined and real....

Huw Gwynn-Jones

Say her Name Not the physical boy but the masculine shadow, cruciform over the family. Geraldine Clarkson Sometimes I see his ageing face, that stare, pained and cold as a codfish. Is this how it was, Uncle, the incessant hunger, your mother’s belly, trial by fire?...

Kathy Miles

Fallout rain fell differently that year air hung on its chains clothed in a plume of ions it lay beneath the ground bitter as history or a buried tongue some said the sheep were glowing in the dark ghosting fields with blue light their hooves dusted with stars lambs...

Sydney Lea

Violence 4 August, 2020 We once longed to have bald eagles back. And back they came, from poisons that doomed so many over the years. At last, they’re common again. This morning, I saw two wrangle over a hatchling loon in the crown of a pine. Their little war shivered...

John Muro

Sea Drift Something of this place stays with me still and the hand-cloth of memory will not allow me to wipe it away. It’s pinned beneath a world that’s beyond forgetting and smelling always of salted brume and rusted metal and the nearly sweet scent of diesel fuel...

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...