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
Neil Beardmore
Cave Paintings, Onuke Kundi,Near Hampi, India Boulders of granite tossed intumbling piles around a flat oasisof date palms hold the plateausafe from intrusion. Camouflaged by the earth’s ochre,a bulge of rock with deer,where men, no longer sticks with sticks,come to...
Kathryn Kimball
The Ghost Magnolia in commemoration of the opening of the National Memorial forPeace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama, April 2018 Give me a ladder to climbthe ghost magnoliaon the corner of Pleasant Avenueto sit there with the sweet fragranceof the foot-wide blossoms...
Lola Haskins
The Perch The glacier on which I stand has become an island.Blue and white as the insides of clouds, it calvesinto the sea which is no longer ice, and the newbeings, the calves, sink slowly, but they sink. The glacier on which I stand is a mystery in whichI used to...
Peter Robinson
Evening Primrose You call me out as the light goesto watch our evening primroselemon-yellow petals splay. With more rain threatened for the weekend,sun come and gone all day,getting ahead of itself againcan a summer remember its springtime?Is it welcoming of autumn?...
Jeanette Burney
The Discoverer Undiscovers 1948 Explorers take a trip to discover Antarctica.They take their leave of household chores.They take boats.They take cameras.Then they take white stretches of Antarctic iceonto film. Adventurers take trips too,to get away from home, and...
Geoffrey Winch
Walter Palmer (from Encounters with Oscar) plays painters parties poets –Oscar’s social round never ceasing Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Beardsleyand always Reggie and Robbie fascination of the fond-ofand the influential Lillie Langtry, Henry Irvingand always Reggie and...
Tim Dwyer
After Chang Chi-Ho These twenty years of banishmentbecame a gift. Though it is saidI fled from the world, here I found it – my beloved, the moon,my friend, the sea,my shelter, the sky. I wake to the welcomeof dawn’s open doorand the gull’s spirit call. I didn’t flee...
Jan FitzGerald
Sky Goodbye I didn’t see you at the funeral.You weren’t there.I believe you escaped in a shaft of lightstreaming through the stained glass window,before the organist went all stops outand speakers leant too long on the pulpit —as far away as possible from all that...
Denise Bennett
Speaking to my Dead Mother What are we doing here in this station tearoom?We’ve slipped back sixty years.You’re wearing your grey pencil-slim skirtqueuing for the buffet. Sipping tea.I’m in my pink cotton frock covered in smuts.You’d told me not to sit facing the...
Terry Quinn
The Doppler Effect is me standing stillthe sound of my heartracingto the sound of her voicecalling my nameas she runs up the pathto hand me an ultrasoundI’d left on her ward is me standingmy heart stillas we talkfor a few minutesabout transducersand the right type of...
Stephen Boyce
Perigee I have been looking to the Eastwhere they tell you everythingis illusion, nothing lasts. The night of the strawberry moon,though I saw it, I was shutteredin a windowless room. I saw you standing in a fieldwith your back to that glowing moonamong grasses,...
Bridget Khursheed
Plotting Doggerland There are farms you reveal as our plane slidestowards Amsterdam. An ex-navy surveyorof forgotten seafloor, you have seenthis obscure bombscape drilled into neolithic geography. Using a digital weather-eye,submersible and deep dive, you sometimes–...
Colin Pink
Surveillance I lie awake at nightthe ghost-of-myself paces the citygets on and off buseshurries through turnstilespauses to look in shop windowsgives a beggar a coinjust stands in the street for no reasonraises suspicion from passers-byhurries ahead againenters the...
Jemma L. King
3 Month Scan A bell curve of grey static against black.What new worlds, old suns burn here? This space, hushed, aseptic. We are sidelinerson the brink of history before her instrument as it ploughs the stars,sends galaxies and all of creation tumbling from view....
Duncan Wu
Fired Up Ruthless hot the angry August sun glaresdown upon the slope. Nothing moves. Mydog sleeps in a pool of light while I stareat a gap in the outer wall which Iwill have to fill. But not right now. With luckI can ignore it till the weather cools.This is the...