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

John Knowles

Piano Roll

They would have seen it
in the first piano rolls. No music
without ‘the space between the notes’.
How the music takes place

in silence, the white paper
unrolling with its morse
of dots, of held dashes. Each
recorded performance unique.

Would have seen how each roll
could be extended out. How
so much art could
still be pattern, as if they looked

unexpectedly at its secret,
its code. Saw, to their own astonishment,
how the contours of its sound
could be mapped, could flatten.

Still searching for scarlet pimpernel and toadflax,
endangered cowslips – no luck. Even on
chalkland, beside the Edward Thomas stone,
the flowers are poor and few. I learned up to
a hundred names from the famous Flower Fairies –
those little books I treasured as a child.
The artist – one of those women who didn’t marry
because of World War One. The fairies – children
decked out in dragonfly wings and coloured costumes,
just as they breathed one hundred years ago.
A boy perched on the huge trunk of an elm tree,
a plant called eyebright ‘on the hillside bare’.
Far back, I just remember fields of foxgloves;
I think they’re not there now. And quietly, utter
the lost names – thrift, bee orchid, shepherd’s purse ….

More Guest Poems

Leonard Lambert

Cartographic i.m. Dave Walker Vanished friends toss youinto altered terrain,as if some surveyorsof the heartwere hazily erasing landmarks,former features,wearily redrawingyour inner universe,the sad cartography of...

Jackie Hutchinson

Orca A discus slicing water into two camps.Point surge tipped from abundance to scarcity,current knowledge (bound) in an oceanic history. She balances the world’s memory into yin yang black,strikes above the wave, whose day is showering blueyearns the absence of super...

Gavin Lyon

My Garden I have been here far too longwith the grass growing through mesprouting up on my toes and chest,flowers adorning my hair.A bird perches on the lawnof my leg watching the beespollinate the laurel of my head.The woodlice inside my hearthave burrows through its...

Elizabeth Cook

Avoir du Poids Degas knew it: the weightof his hand on thick paperas he pressed down or skimmedwith a crayon. The strong armof the Repasseuse as she guides the hot ironround the seams of chemisesand blousons: the outs and insof complicated pleats. Miss La La– how the...

Eugene O’Hare

CPR On his knees in the wet street he pressedon the chest of a stranger older than his mother. Gifting again her lungs with his breath, then handsre-clasped in a kind of prayer-meets-compression. (What are prayers anyway without repetition?Or miracles, in this case,...

Susan Kambalu

Orcadian Inheritance For Ann Scarth (née Harper), 1762 to 1867, Evie, Orkney My dear child, you can travel the worldbut I am bound to this place, this grey blue sky and sea, this brown green land, red grey standing stones.I live, I live, I lived a hundred years and...

Clive Watkins

The Dance Morning Walk at Cannon Hall, Barnsley Electric orange, acid yellow, cyan, these bird-likeguardians, totems carved from pine and oak, installedin their set stations, keep watch over the narrow serpentine,the muddy island, this tangled wilderness of...

Emma Lee

A Rhizomic Persuasion Golden Shovel based on a quote from Elizabeth Heyrick’s ‘Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition: or an Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest and Most Effectual means of getting rid of West Indian Slavery’ In Leicester market watch whatpeople stop to buy,...

Doreen Hinchliffe

A Patch Of Sunlight Speaks Breathing the dust of centuries, I spreadmyself beneath your beam that slants above,its shaft across my face. Alone, I’m dead,my whole existence turns upon your love.Darkened by shadows, troubled by the soundof trampling feet, I long to fly...

John Tanner

Losing a Language Death-rattleon the pebbles. This is a tide that won’t return. The waves’ eloquencebreaking, leaving onlya scattering of shallow poolsthat shrink towards oblivion. Take this drypebble in your hand.Remember how the lips of the seacould make it...

Neil Elder

Fact or Fiction Mornings, I scroll through the news on my phone;I like to know the world still exists before leavingthe house. Though today, I don’t want to readabout how Europe is on fire and the ice capsare melting, I just don’t have capacity anymore.Instead I shall...

Anne Stewart

Charlie Charlie was huge – ‘last time I saw a spider as big as that’a man I loved had told me once ‘I tried to bash it with my shoeand it took it off me and hit me back…’ She was blackest black – glossy, plum of a body,short stout legs at the ready, eyes peeled better...

Jen Herron

The Dead They buried him in a shoeboxamongst the terraced stones,packed in tight as teeth. God help the hand that puts me there.Don’t sandblast my nameon a bookmarked bible slab.Don’t trap me in an eight by six,gawked at by the passing busas next door’s dog lifts its...

Dennis Tomlinson

Cheddar Gorge I walked up the road from Anne’s hotel,climbing onto limestone heights,kaleidoscope inside my head. I can’t … I can’t … it’s impossible … I thought the cliffs an awesome sight,below the bushes dropping steep,suffused in eerie golden light. I can’t … I...

Kate Hendry

Talking to Thrushes for Andy, of Maggie’s Centre Instead of you, I’ll talk to the thrush.As I can’t book an appointment,I’ll talk to a sparrow too – one that calls from the hawthorn.Or the nervous starlingon the green steel bridge. When birds are hidden, I’ll talkto...