It began when you opened your desk and found everything gone, replaced with sand. You opened the wooden pencil case your brother had made and it contained nothing but sand. Next, your books filled with sand and the words began to wear away. Your homework was late because sand ate the sums and solutions. Study time vanished in to the time it had … Continue reading ‘Sand’ by Jane Commane
His Heart turned against him in a chicken shop. He said my heart is falling out as he slipped into dreams of his mother in Jamaica. He came through in hospital, longing for the woman, dead twenty years. His son visits and they spend half an hour holding hands. There is a needle in his arm and blood in his colostomy bag. He asks the … Continue reading ‘His Heart’ by Raymond Antrobus
The songs These are the songs which were played in the background of our days in the taxis and shops in every house we set foot in. These are the songs that suddenly disappeared from our lives or we disappeared from them when we left our homeland behind. We carried them in our memories and sang them on family occasions to remember our … Continue reading ‘The songs’ by Choman Hardi
In supermarkets, strapped in a trolley, on the motorway, belted in the back of a car, under the foundered houses, open mouthed and fed by drips, in a box drilled with holes, in the hold of a boat, in fish crates and on cardboard, on pallets and straw, on a bed of needles on the forest floor, in the curve of a rosy scarf … Continue reading ‘Miracle’ by Stephanie Norgate
The Finest Specimen When I was a child my father wrote the twelve fair days of Roscommon on the back of a Players pack and taught me to recite them as farmers used to do. He showed me where the blacksmith had inscribed 1865 on a gate – the year Yeats was born, he’d say. There’s one date you have to remember, your great great … Continue reading Two poems by Jane Clarke
The Water-Carrier I want to be the worst of this profession, the one who makes it home half-empty, tipping more air than water from the ringing pot, and so late back the town’s already dark; Oh no, they’ll say, that’s not the way of it, and I’ll know their heaven’s brimful and undrunk, their lips parched. What do they … Continue reading Two poems by Niall Campbell
Something Understood Be seated. So much silliness. Go in fear of imperatives. Love, as much as anything else, as little. Stop trying to touch the stained light, it’s not for you. Feel the wood instead; use has polished the grain, this is not good, this … Continue reading ‘Something Understood’ by Edward Doegar
Another box of nipples arrived today The hospital computer’s gone mad – that’s the third box this week. You stick them on the fridge door, the phone, the handle of the kettle. And we laugh. Then you are sick again. This evening you sit in your usual chair in the bloat of chemo, your breath really bothering you. And me, if truth be told. You … Continue reading ‘Another box of nipples arrived today’ by Char March
Langspiel New lamps for old sang the harp prepare for sorrow and snow for sleeping on a bare floor New lamps for old sang the harp, be glad to eat alone in the cold kitchen to walk by the golden cliff along the sunlit tide line Get used to the hard work of it sang the harp silver spoon in time’s mouth mote in … Continue reading Two poems by Penelope Shuttle
Sequence of three poems from Electric Shadow The duty of balance I Incendiary During the Blitz, he said, fire-raisers spat on his street. Aircraft freed their bomblets at altitude, blinding scraps of phosphorus that consumed oxygen to flare, grew as they fell, into scores of fires – beacons for incoming bombers, stowing their own DNA of damage. Fierce white lumps scattered like moon-rocks … Continue reading Three poems by Heidi Williamson
