Poem Today

Fake Ruins

Where the sparrows nest And me, reading Medieval lyrics in bed

It was never about me My life I mean I didn’t ask for this

I didn’t ask for this Nice weather The very air I breathe

The cruel colors, pink & red A splash of cloud Cut through by solid gold

I didn’t ask for this Miracle, a mind & body Fake ruins & a tower

Where the sparrows nest My life I mean A single drop of rain

A scrap of paper Upon which I wrote A few lines about beauty

It was never about me An owl & a mourning dove Playing in the dark

Sara Nicholson

Six Apologies, Lord

I Have Loved My Horrible Self, Lord. I Rose, Lord, and I Rose, Lord, And I Dropt. Your Requirements, Lord. 'Spite Your Requirements, Lord, I Have Loved The Low Voltage Of The Moon, Lord, Until There Was No Moon Intensity Left, Lord, No Moon Intensity Left For You, Lord. I Have Loved The Frivolous, The Fleeting, The Frightful Clouds. Lord, I Have Loved Clouds! Do Not Forgive Me, Do Not Forgive Me LordandLover, HarborandMaster, GuardianandBread, Do Not. Hold Me, Lord, O, Hold Me

Accountable, Lord. I Am Accountable, Lord.

Lord It Over Me, Lord It Over Me, Lord. Feed Me

Hope, Lord. Feed Me Hope, Lord, Or Break My Teeth.

Break My Teeth, Sir,

In This My Mouth.

Olena Kalytiak Davis

Child Burial

Your coffin looked unreal, fancy as a wedding cake

I chose your grave clothes with care, your favourite stripey shirt

your blue cotton trousers They smelt of woodsmoke, of October,

your own smell there too. I chose a gansy of handspun wool,

warm and fleecy for you. It is so cold down in the dark.

No light can reach you and teach you the paths of wild birds

the names of the flowers the fishes, the creatures

Ignorant you must remain of the sun and its work,

my lamb, my calf, my eaglet my cub, my kid, my nestling

my suckling, my colt. I would spin time back, take you again

within my womb, your amniotic lair, and further spin you back

through nine waxing months to the split seeding moment

you chose to be made flesh, word within me.

I'd cancel the love feast the hot night of your making.

I would travel alone to a quiet mossy place,

you would spill from me into the earth drop by bright red drop.

Wild Strawberries

What I get, I bring home to you:  a dark handful, sweet-edged,  dissolving in one mouthful. 

I bother to bring them for you  though they’re so quickly over,  pulpless, sliding to juice 

a grainy rub on the tongue  and the taste’s gone. If you remember  we were in the woods at wild strawberry-time 

and I was making a basket of dock-leaves  to hold what you’d picked,  but the cold leaves unplaited themselves 

and slid apart, and again unplaited themselves  until I gave up and ate wild strawberries  out of your hands for sweetness. 

I licked at your palm:  the little salt-edge there,  the tang of money you’d handled. 

As we stayed in the woods, hidden,  we heard the sound system below us  calling the winners at Chepstow,  faint as the breeze turned. 

The sun came out on us, the shade blotches  went hazel: we heard names  bubble like stock-doves over the woods 

as jockeys in stained silks gentled  those sweat-dark, shuddering horses  down to the walk.

Helen Dunmore (1952-2017)

from Out of the Blue, New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2001), © Helen Dunmore

From Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941 - 1995

My girl, my woman, my wife in the country. Beating my eggs and arranging my bed, Arranging my hair—just as she likes it. Fresh flowers on the table and behind her ears, In her hair. Wood fires and twigs, Apples and figs, and thwacking Footsteps across a wooden floor, on Monday morning. And also on Tuesday. No telephone, no guests, only our ego-system Of work, love making, and who will cook today? All our striving will be who shall please The other the most or the more.

A Celtic Skull in the Museum at La Tène

Two-thousand years and more untouched I burned In soil’s slow fire. On the beach Above, ringed by thin, withered trees, the sky Rang with the haunted shore bird’s screech.

The water’s face can make a door, and so They bound my arms with fur, cut off my head, Dropped me on cold and stony shore. Still young, I was an offering to gods now dead Themselves and silent through these many years. The druids uttered words to lightly brush The distant ears of gods. I bled the lake’s White margins dark. Then came the weighted hush. They caught me with a trowel and dusting brush And pulled me softly from the earth’s brown sleep To sit behind museum glass and glare, Jawless and silent in the glass cube keep.

Benjamin Myers

First printed in First Things (July 13, 2026).

Raccoon

The raccoon wears a black mask, And he washes everything Before he eats it. If you Give him a cube of sugar, He'll wash it away and weep. Some of life's sweetest pleasures Can be enjoyed only if You don't mind a little dirt. Here a false face won't help you.

Sandpiper

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,

and that every so often the world is bound to shake.

He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,

in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet

of interrupting water comes and goes

and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.

He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

--Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them

where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains

rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,

he stares at the dragging grains.

The world is a mist. And then the world is

minute and vast and clear. The tide

is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.

His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.

Poor bird, he is obsessed!

The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray

mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Out of Catullus

Come and let us live my Deare, Let us love and never feare, What the sowrest Fathers say: Brightest Sol that dies to day Lives againe as blithe to morrow, But if we darke sons of sorrow Set; o then, how long a Night Shuts the Eyes of our short light! Then let amorous kisses dwell On our lips, begin and tell A Thousand, and a Hundred, score An Hundred, and a Thousand more, Till another Thousand smother That, and that wipe of another. Thus at last when we have numbered Many a Thousand, many a Hundred; Wee'l confound the reckoning quite, And lose our selves in wild delight: While our joyes so multiply, As shall mocke the envious eye.

Fucked-Up Ode

We all know that moment when the woman lays her hand on the man's scar. We have all heard water pouring in Brahms, wrens twitter in the flowering bush. Still we don't understand each other? What a lot of practice it takes making the howling face blank. We manage the couch up the stairs' right angle, we've touched each other exactly right, both touching and being touched but then we miss each other by seconds which is all chaos needs. It's not just mis- hearing that makes us shout what we don't mean, throw money on the table and leave. Always too much and not enough, all those workbooks full of calculations worthless. We swore each day we'd check the tadpoles, threw the knife so far into the air, we forgot to keep watch for it coming back down. How many letters are being crumpled up right now? I find myself saying I love you to almost nothing, to fog. Can't we go back to being children with keys looped on string around our necks?

Antares

You point to Antares. The wind rustles the cottonwood leaves. And the intermittent

rain sounds like a fifty- string zither. A red lotus blossoms. in the air. And, touching you, I am like light from

Antares. It has taken me light- years to arrive.

Arthur Sze

These Poems

These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready?

These words they are stones in the water running away

These skeletal lines they are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger learning to worship the strangers around me

whoever you are whoever I may become.

Witches

My sister’s screams brought Mummy running: Did you push her? They drove to the hospital leaving me alone in the house.

I read a book by the window until I couldn’t see the words. Too scared to turn on the light, I watched ghostly white roses disappear into the dark.

Once, in a fever, I’d dreamed of witches who lived in the loft flying through the hatch. Now they crouched behind the wings of my chair.

I tried not to breathe, pretending to be dead like the stone girl in the churchyard or my sister if all her blood rolled out of her leg.

If she died, people would think I was sad. The witches knew the truth – smelling my wickedness with huge hooked noses.

Vicki Feaver

First published in Poetry London (Spring 2012, No. 71)

Vicki Feaver writes: The story of ‘The Witches’ is true. My sister did fall off a wall. I didn’t push her. But, left behind while my parents took her to hospital, I felt as if I had. ‘Why didn’t you turn the light on?’ they asked when they returned to find me sitting in the dark. The answer – which as the older sister, expected to behave as an adult, I would have been too ashamed to give – was that I was too frightened that the witches of my dream were waiting behind my chair.

Simple

A break in the clouds. The blue outline of the mountains. Dark yellow of the fields. Black river. What am I doing here, lonely and filled with remorse?

I go on casually eating from the bowl of raspberries. If I were dead, I remind myself, I wouldn’t be eating them. It’s not so simple. It is that simple.

God to the Serpent

Beloved Snake, perhaps my finest blueprint, How can I not take pride in your design? Your passage without hoof or paw or shoe-print Revels in art’s and nature’s S-curve line.

No ears, no whiskers, fingers, legs or teeth' No cries, complaints, or curses from you start; But silence shares your body in its sheath, Full-functioning with no superfluous part.

Men try to emulate your forked tongue, Their prideful piece dwarfed by your lordly length. Two arms for blows or hugging loosely hung Are mocked by Boa Constrictor’s single strength.

How dare men claim their image as my own, With all those limbs and features sticking out? You, Snake, with continuity of bone Need but a spine to coil and cruise about.

Men fear the force of your hypnotic eyes, Make myths to damn your being wise and deft. You, Snake, not men, deserve my cosmic prize. I’m glad you stayed in Eden when they left.

Virginia Hamilton Adair

Meditation on a Bone

A piece of bone, found at Trondhjem in 1901, with the following runic inscription (about AD 1050) cut on it: I loved her as a maiden; I will not trouble Erlend’s detestable wife; better she should be a widow.

Words scored upon a bone, Scratched in despair or rage – Nine hundred years have gone; Now, in another age, They burn with passion on A scholar’s tranquil page.

The scholar takes his pen And turns the bone about, And writes those words again. Once more they seethe and shout, And through a human brain Undying hate rings out.

‘I loved her when a maid; I loathe and love the wife That warms another’s bed: Let him beware his life!’ The scholar’s hand is stayed; His pen becomes a knife

To grave in living bone The fierce archaic cry. He sits and reads his own Dull sum of misery. A thousand years have flown Before that ink is dry.

And, in a foreign tongue, A man, who is not he, Reads and his heart is wrung This ancient grief to see, And thinks: When I am dung, What bone shall speak for me?

Even Now It Is Inside of Me

Those winter evenings when snowstorms knocked out the power we gathered at the kitchen table, where in shadow my grandfather lifted the glass chimney

& lit the oil lamp. Like the oil, I trembled. Like the wick, I cleanly burned. How dark

it was outside. How close we were in that light. How quiet.

Joe Wilkins