NaPoReMo #16: Show and tell

  The sun has burst the sky Jenny Joseph The sun has burst the sky Because I love you And the river its banks. The sea laps the great rocks Because I love you And takes no heed of the moon dragging it away And saying coldly ‘Constancy is not for you.’ The blackbird fills

NaPoReMo #15: Writing on a donkey

  Ford Robbie Burton The donkey followed me to the ford. I pointed at the river’s grey colour and told him how it ran orange back in the steelworks days and trout and limestone turned rusty. I showed him how, even now, you could scrape a stone and still disturb red oxide. The donkey remained

NaPoReMo #14: Fried slice

  english breakfast wrestling the perfume of frying eggs, a trace of whisky orbits the sun. it is bastille day and the pale sky shrinks. an ash-tray is slowly filling. the old man with no fingers remembers the shriek of the circular saw; his belligerent jumper straining at the seams a leaking prostate dampening his

NaPoReMo #13: We are sailing

Today’s poem appears in a photo because I can’t do the indents properly in WordPress, and a poem’s appearance is important. The visual and aural content of poetry is part of what distinguishes it from prose. If you centre a poem, leave italics out, change punctuation or line breaks, then you’re changing the decisions made by

NaPoReMo #12: Herd instinct

Searchlight Jim Carruth A toddler double-wrapped in heavy woollens, wedged snug in the open mouth of a ten-gallon can, I’d watch my parents work down the stalls of Ayrshires, drawing off milk along the cobbled byre. Over hunched shoulders they’d check on me, high up in my watchtower in that hall of shadows, before bending

NaPoReMo #11: a reckoning

I have a little solar flower on my windowsill, which cheerily waves its arms until dusk and then slowly goes to sleep. I once gave a similar flower to my friend Robbie, who recently showed me a photo of it bobbing away on her late husband’s grave. I loved that image; the irrepressible little trinket, keeping

NaPoReMo #10: Brian fever

I believe in poetry as a means of connection, a kind of emotional battery which only works if the reader and writer each hold one end. The poet can give a dazzling display of word play, but if s/he doesn’t make contact with the reader then it’s wasted.

NaPoReMo #9: leaping greenly

  i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth day of life and

NaPoReMo #8: I do like to be beside the seaside

  Inland Edna St. Vincent Millay People that build their houses inland, People that buy a plot of ground Shaped like a house, and build a house there, Far from the sea-board, far from the sound Of water sucking the hollow ledges, Tons of water striking the shore,— What do they long for, as I

NaPoReMo #7: I’ll go to the foot of our stairs

BEATTIE IS THREE Adrian Mitchell At the top of the stairs I ask for her hand.  O.K. She gives it to me. How her fist fits my palm, A bunch of consolation. We take our time Down the steep carpetway As I wish silently That the stairs were endless.  * [from The Apeman Cometh, Cape