Normalisation It’s like the old days; a fortnight’s needs in tins under the stairs. The crisis, like the weather is changeable. Some days the shops are full, the power constant. Some days the streets are calm. The news is still earnest nothings, outrage, sport and gossip. They haven’t yet asked for your passwords. The leaves turn. You still have a job. The wild … Continue reading Three poems by Tom Sastry
An Early Swim She cuts down her lane like scissors through blue silk with barely a snip; her deft turn at each end is a stitch. One morning, she will rise from the ladder, the pool draped over her shoulders like a cape of kingfishers. He rolls like a barrel of vintage port cast overboard, his crawl Shakespearean in its comedy and slaughter … Continue reading Two poems by Mark Fiddes
Three poems from Near Future Summer with Robobees Those long evenings they giddied in the warm wealth of the oilseed rapefields humidity sensors estimating approaching storms * We picnicked on the lawn in July – shuttlecocks pinged distantly our scones and jam unbothered by the robobees their algorithms danced them between marigolds * Sometimes they get indoors through open windows go from … Continue reading Three poems by Suzannah Evans
October 4th 2003 Our future is a free flying kite or a gull or a scarf on the wind. I bend gracefully to thank and smile, thank and smile; a ballerina in a music box. That night I unpin my hair, in a ritual undressing, a re-virgining of my whole self, it seems absolutely right that the roots at my scalp ache, as … Continue reading Three poems by Wendy Pratt
Returning ‘You say I am repeating something I have said before… I shall say it again. This is the spring time but not in time’s covenant.’ – T.S. Eliot, East Coker/Little Gidding One afternoon I woke up words no one uses now: When Flora had ourfret the firth, in May of every moneth queen, when merle and mavis singis with mirth, more … Continue reading Two poems by Kevin Cahill
Without Trying Although without trying we are in step in the sunken lane I walk with the green-veined butterfly and you are alone at my side. My friend flies ahead, explores wild honeysuckle but returns and circles us like … Continue reading Three poems by Ginny Saunders
As You Are 90, I Must Be 65 There’s something wrong with the guttering: it could be nests. When it rains cataracts drown the geraniums. This is one problem. Another is the rockery, overrun by Creeping Jenny and saplings which would become a forest left to their own devices. Someone stole the lilies-of-the-valley, and the heathers, which promised so well, have disappeared. The … Continue reading Two poems by Kathy Pimlott
Three poems from The AQI (smith|doorstop 2018) Smog I don’t have long to write so let me tell you that today’s smog is so thick that I’ve sat inside with a headache, wearing a face-mask next to an air purifier, that the recorded figures are double the hazardous limit, that these measurements are probably a generous estimate, that I’m sitting within my … Continue reading Three poems by David Tait
Conversation Nina Simone playing in the background of a Café. Rasta: Write it bloody and true, write the Passion of Black, write the psalms of a people, write the jazz, write the gospels, write it plain, write the protest songs from cover to cover. Illuminate the pages with love. Writer: How do you write about the hate of centuries and not tear down … Continue reading Three poems by Roy McFarlane
Feckless Sometimes it makes him angry, this dying, and I keep doing things wrong, forget to soften the stars with almond milk before I bring them to his bedside on a saucer, buy the wrong kind of green tea, the wrong kind of holy water from the village shop. He says there are things that need darning but I end up darning the … Continue reading Three poems by Gaia Holmes
