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

Tim Dwyer

After Chang Chi-Ho

These twenty years of banishment
became a gift. Though it is said
I fled from the world, here I found it –

my beloved, the moon,
my friend, the sea,
my shelter, the sky.

I wake to the welcome
of dawn’s open door
and the gull’s spirit call.

I didn’t flee the world,
the world found me.

Chang Chi-Ho, dead for years.
I’m the grey-haired fisherman
of water and mist, who

casts the line empty of bait
into the constant river,
fish swimming free, until

I will join the dust.

I didn’t see you at the funeral.
You weren’t there.
I believe you escaped in a shaft of light
streaming through the stained glass window,
before the organist went all stops out
and speakers leant too long on the pulpit —
as far away as possible from all that palaver.

Out into the crunch of snow,
skis over one shoulder,
you tramped to the highest ridge
looking down on the village
as mourners now traipsed towards a hall
for hot scones and a gabfest

and appraising the last slope
before daffodils poked through the thaw,
you adjusted your goggles, took a deep breath
and propelled yourself
into air sweet as heaven.

More Guest Poems

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...

Doreen Hinchliffe

Memento Mori at an exhibition of Victorian photographs of the dead Posed and dressed in Sunday best, their heads clamped tight in a metal vice, their bodies propped on stands or chairs, they stare at us across the years and fix us with their unreal eyes, inviting us...

Geoffrey Winch

In this Silence To her the silence had been in itself a prayer, the deepest, the holiest, the most illuminating. T. F. Powys: Mister Tasker’s Gods its utter depth and width can only leave one standing on this canyon’s rim entirely without speech its walls stacked so...

Barbara Cumbers

Of all the stars, the loveliest ... Sappho: Fragments on love and desire ... are the Pleiades for they are blue like the sparkles of ice in the coldness of air for they cluster like buds of angelica for the glow that surrounds them is the birthplace of stars for they...

Isabel S. Miles

Sunflower Potatoes, cherry trees and wheat begin in darkness, as sunflowers do, rooted in dank clay, eating ochre, seeking light. With brush for bow and canvases for instruments, in colours only he had vision clean enough to see, he played sonatas filled with blossoms...

Estill Pollock

In Places We Invent In places we invent, cities not cities In ways we knew, in our little understanding Of structures and remorse, where stations prosper From years of long cold, or in savannahs Dry winds strip breathless, our new lives Printed veils of fabrics, tools...

John Gosslee

Below the Night Sky and Blazing My bones hollow, but I don’t grow feathers like a good bird. The village torches mark the trails from the foothills into the rows of shops, onto the box-heavy-delivery-truck-filled roads, the scabs of progress flicker under the...

Robert Dorsett

Voice for the War Refugees The suffering of others is always a foreign language. They speak, leave gaps for others to fill. Keep meaning close, crisp and dangerous. Packed into camps, huddled behind wire, they bandy facts into lies, clench fear into a pause. And speak...

Eleanor Westwood

Breaking News 16.3.22 the child, too excited for school the husband, heart in his guts twisting the woman kissing her parents goodbye the passport bearing her name in her own hands her sweat impregnating the cover joins the man whose family wait for him negotiators...