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
Neil Elder
Fact or Fiction
Mornings, I scroll through the news on my phone;
I like to know the world still exists before leaving
the house. Though today, I don’t want to read
about how Europe is on fire and the ice caps
are melting, I just don’t have capacity anymore.
Instead I shall put my head in a book,
a huge 19th century classic with sentences
so long that I forget their beginnings and pages
and pages describing a woman making a fire
early one morning, before she receives the letter
that changes the course of her life forever.
Once her secret is out, she must flee from London
hoping to find help from the one she once loved.
A ping from my phone marks the arrival
of the day’s first email: the world still wants.
But I am staying here; with my heroine, in a carriage
rattling through a storm towards uncertain futures.
Anne Stewart
Charlie
Charlie was huge – ‘last time I saw a spider as big as that’
a man I loved had told me once ‘I tried to bash it with my shoe
and it took it off me and hit me back…’
She was blackest black – glossy, plum of a body,
short stout legs at the ready, eyes peeled better than mine
for any shift of light that might warn of an attack.
And she was smart – sat mid-wall, long edge of the bed,
where any approach triggered a shift; took to flight sooner
at each advance of a trap.
She and I fell into a pact – I’d come into the room,
she’d shift to face me, chipper as a puppy, ‘Found something to eat?’
I’d say, half-expecting a wisecrack.
Time for lights out, I’d tiptoe the cold floor in the borrowed dark,
huddle under the covers, feeling safer, a little – smaller, less visible
now I had my head in the sand.
At least Charlie was sorted – she had no need to run any more,
no need to find an invisible corner to hide out in.
I took some comfort in that.
More Guest Poems
Winifred Mok
Grave Sweeping Every Ching Ming, April showers weepmisty tears across the land, seepinginto gaps of loss. Gifts of paper energisethe spirits (a suit, a watch, a house) as warpingflames consume ingots, paper-gold flecks on the vergeof a hot red tin: the borderline...
Toby Buckley
Elephant Caretaker I cannot imaginestealing an elephant,notorious as they arefor being difficultto compress comfortably,but elephant caretakersuse sharphooks to find the tenderparts of elephants’mouths and inner ears,the secret malleabilityto make the beastsinto...
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...