Category: Poetry

Poetry

Kay

By Joseph Clayton

Among the breeze,

Twisting its way between

A tangle of pebbles, windswept

A snatch of laughter

Half-chuckle, half-wheeze,

Among that dry, ceaseless wind,

Waves hastened and broken

Reflect the evening sun,

A glimpse of merriment,

The glint in your eye.

I fancy, for a moment,

You appear before me,

Playing cards in hand

And at once I am

Twelve again, and it is raining,

Tohunga Crescent slick beneath the deluge.

‘Last card!’,

and you smile,

Bella triumphant as ever —

The card shark with her

Tiny crown of curls,

We will head

Down the bay in just a moment

Once I retrieve my sandals

From under the deck,

And you have finished

Your chapter.

And then you are gone,

And as I thread my way

Back through the rocks,

Buffeted by that

Dry, ceaseless wind,

I can see Karl in his outhouse

My sandals, still under the deck,

Unretrieved.

You were a certainty,

Timeless,

And now, as the wind tears around me

I am unable to cry.

Poetry

Spring Sequence

Spring Sequence

Emma Large

We have wrestled hard into April,

Through the bunched knuckles

Of stonier-fisted months. Now,

Spring takes us with forgiveness,

Things feel leaner, my mother

Looks at me with quiet eyes.

I stretch to meet

What has opened in her:

Tenderness that extends back to me

In the rawer light; draws our

Childhoods to touch, gently,

Like two friends’ shoulders

Brushing together as they walk.

I’m not sure what is new and what

I have always known, or why

It took this to know it. I sit smoking

With her into spring dusk, until

The linear wanes liminal: youth doesn’t

Come from strength, never floods

All at once; it glows and stutters in and

Out of this dimness, bruises freshen

This skin all the time. Old things take

New shape; we stretch, come into line.

Poetry

A Song

A Song

Lawrence Gartshore

A song upon the autumn wind

that does float and call me to your side,

like a siren beckoning a sailor to his end;

this love is true, it cannot bend.

And yet in your aura death loses its sting

and becomes naught but a sweet release from the pain

that being in love with you does cause;

my heart is open, emotion bleeds and pours.

So, at the end, when I close my eyes,

the curtain calls, I say my goodbyes,

the memory of you shall always be twinned

with that song upon the autumn wind.

Poetry

Boys Learn to Moan (Like Men)

Post author By Sebastian Lloyd
Post date May 2, 2023
No Comments on Boys Learn to Moan (Like Men)

Boys Learn to Moan (Like Men)

Sebastian Lloyd

It begins with a certain wispy prince.

Perhaps a captain of the one of the ball sports, or the first lad to heave around a doorstop novel.

He starts being sheepish at show and tell.

Mumbling to the floor about his weekend Nerf war.

Stops playing, preferring to stand by the monkey bars, tapping his knee.

Then one day, he’ll turn to you.

“I said to ask your parents to buy Miss Pilgrim something for the last day, to all give her your Flat Stanley pictures on time, to help me.

If you’d all helped, diplomatically, we’d be building the stick insect cage together!”

He struggles through ‘diplomatically’, but we all know what he means.

He could be placing the plastic trees, pouring the cups of pebbles,

Letting ‘Twiggy’ walk tentatively down his finger.

He could be feigning a gawk at their finished work, catching a glance at the glossy ringlets of her hair up close.

What if she saw something in him, worth capsizing her life for, and you were too shy.

He’ll heave a sharp contraction, expel what’s borrowed.

There’ll be a well in his eye.

Then huff and puff and cry, big tears, like handbags

Hanging off his ribs. Friction for the heart’s brakes,

Squeezing his sobs to a moan.

There’ll be tears on your face too, your hand on the playground’s polished wood.

Although a few stay while he waters.

Afterwards you disappear to your own corners, to play in worlds of your own.

Poetry

And s(n)o(w) it falls

And s(n)o(w) it falls

Orla Cowan

rooftops and windowsills shoulder with

quiet acquiescence the flaky pinpricks

of icy ashes – and (look!) there is

an equal, fickle coating of the pavement –

nonetheless with a movement

decisive, deliberate, perhaps well-meant

Look, there is more than one captured sense

now the morning’s silence is crystallised

in clear, printed lines from eye to mind –

spiralling, soon-to-fade footfalls left behind.

Poetry

Breathing the Sheets

Breathing the Sheets

Daniel Xiberras

A packed station

When I bolt upright

And air still carries weight

It affirms something:

I am shattered.

Beloved bone China, self sutured,

Tears sprouting through crude stitches

saturate and swell brittle twine.

Poetry

In Solingen there is a flowerbed where there used to be a synagogue

Post author By Anna Johns
Post date April 24, 2023
No Comments on In Solingen there is a flowerbed where there used to be a synagogue

In Solingen there is a flowerbed where there used to be a synagogue

Anna Johns

Johanna catches up with her mother over the phone
and I could have been eavesdropping, if things had been different.
In Berlin I stutter, mit Sojamilch, bitte.
and the waitress says, that will be twenty cents extra
is that okay?

When Thea came to England,
she must have chewed on the words like rocks in her teeth
spoken to her children like tourists.
Was English too soft a language
to talk about what happened?

When she so quietly left
did she know then that she would not go back to Solingen
and that someone else’s grandchild
would trim the vines on her sister’s grave.

She must have known,
not to go looking for God in Germany.
He was not there.
She would not find him.

I learn conjugations by rote
and write verb tables
with the words she used to pray with.

Poetry

Catching a Train

Catching a Train

Sophie Bex

A packed station

A bustling sea of loneliness

Little dream bubbles collide

Cups of tea and roaring fires

Friendly faces and tight hugs

The sea disperses, racing, jostling

Desperate to escape onto the approaching train

Leading them away to places they long for

Away from places they long to stay in.

Panic ensues –

Quick find a seat, one that’s not reserved,

space for a bag?

Chests tighten, heat rises

The sea dreams once again

The world racing by as they sit cocooned in their

little time capsule

Consumed by their own thoughts

Unaware that life continues on outside their

window.

Poetry

Llysfaen

Llysfaen

Jake Roberts

Movement in the cold stasis.

A cat hugs a smattering of

Snow-capped graves, winding

Thoughtlessly past mourners, their

Eyes fixed to stagnant, waning feet.

The chill makes to follow her path

So each visage, betrayed, lifts to breathe

A fleeting warmth: life

Pulls together what here is torn.

Unknowing, denying, the cat makes haste

Along uniform patches of past

Congregations, hard with the season,

Drooping heads and frozen ink,

Deep into balding hedgerows

And out, still further from our crowd.

Atop a mound, she halts to rest

And watch, as we did, the distant tide –

Morbid sundial, we all sense the time.

Ignorant of the love she undermines,

She pads the frost and waits for mice.

Poetry

Poetic of the Going

Poetic of the Going

Emma Large

Non poet, you don’t know how

maddening it is to bring back

and back and

back and back to

margin, when I want to keep my hand

where the blood is, where the throbbing starts,

the sunken place before words only the body knows.

Keep my palm to the membrane from which the heart

swells out like an embryo against its shell,

in that valley before feeling surfaces; remembering

the brown flagstones of your skin, warmed

in afternoon sun. I unravel us like threads

to keep our mess in my pocket and to touch

their feathered ends, every now and then,

because sometimes I like missing things to

feel I am living,

to dredge last blood for sake of requiem;

though your skin before me now, I wouldn’t touch.

It occurs to me that even our elegy

wasn’t written to mourn you. Sentiment

for sake of feeling, grieving the going

over what is gone; how happy I am

you do not know

all my little cruelties.

wayzgoose

wayzgoose

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