The Saturday poem: Bad Dream
by David ConstantineThere was a path, the familiar path, the oneI've very often not yet ventured onAround a mountainside, cut level, a sheerFall right, a sheer wall left, a ledge a pairMight amble hand...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: The Voice
by Thomas HardyWoman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,Saying that now you are not as you wereWhen you had changed from the one who was all to me,But as at first, when our day was...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Gethsemane
by Rowan WilliamsWho said that trees grow easilycompared with us? What if the bright bare load that pushes down on theminsisted that they spread and bowedand pleated back on themselves and crackedand...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Cradle Cap
by Fiona BensonIt begins as a roughness,then spreads to a lichenous crustthat helmets your head for months,and for months a cuckoo-spit salvewets down your scalpas we try to soak it off.Continue...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Knowing the Code
by Stewart Conn(for David and Mim)Continue reading...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: hesiod
by Cees NooteboomAncient poet, touched by the Muses themselves,so you claimed at least,with a branch of laurel, or was that just boasting?Continue reading...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Lessons in the Orchard
by Carol Ann DuffyAn apple's soft thump on the grass, somewhenin this place. What was it? Beauty of Bath.What was it? Yellow, vermillion, round, big, splendid;already escaping the edge of itself,like...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Elegy for a Walnut Tree
by WS MerwinOld friend now there is no one alivewho remembers when you were youngit was high summer when I first saw youin the blaze of day most of my life agowith the dry grass whispering in your...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Addiction to an Old Mattress
by Rosemary TonksNo, this is not my life, thank God worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag;Obsessed first by one person, and then(Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another;These...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Square Man
by Melissa Lee-HoughtonYou're a square man. Everything about you is square: your face, your chin, your body,the squareness of your opinions,the squareness of your emotional life.With so many sides and...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: When Considering the Long, Long Journey of 28,000...
by Kei MillerTo them who knew to break free from dark hold of shipsContinue reading...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: That Was the Summer
by Kit WrightThat was the summer as I recall,the man next door and I beganto call each other Sir,in a kind of roguish formality ormock-combative collusion. Why,I cannot say, but keep it upwe somehow...
View ArticleThe Saturday poem: The Catch
by Ben WilkinsonFor you, the catch wasn't something caught:not word or contender, attention or fire.Not the almost-missed train, or the sortof wave surfers might wait an entire lifetime for. Not the...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Extremophile
by Sheenagh PughTwo miles below the light, bacterialive without sun, thrive on sulphurin a cave of radioactive rock,and, blind in the night of the ocean floor,molluscs that feed only on woodwait for...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Jack Woolley's Dream
by Tony Williamsi.m. Arnold PetersContinue reading...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: 1st March: Ain Kiniyya
by Yves Berger, translated by John BergerSpring covers with a greenexiles never forgetthe hills where wandering herdsgraze the growing grassContinue reading...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: The Birthday
by Michael LongleyThis is our first birthday without you,My twin, July the twenty-seventh.Where are you now? I'm looking out for you.Have you been skinny-dipping at AllaranWhere the jellies won't...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Mammy Dozes
by Colette BryceMammy dozes in her chair.Cushions packed in soft layersare glowing with her heat.Eighty years have lent her skina bruised look in composure,a touch of purplesto the hollows, so Mammy...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Poem to a Friend Feeling Out of His Element
by Tony RobertsTurgenev tells of a little French drummercaught by the peasants of Smolenskafter the sack of Moscow and how,as they were preparing to cram himdown a hole in the Gniloterka River,a...
View ArticleOn Clapton Pond at dawn
by Kate TempestThe pond was calmthe sky was newyour voice was soft your lies were true.You were me and I was youand I was going blind with you.Continue reading...
View Article
