Explore poetry
A Meeting of Minds with Henry David Thoreau
Andrew Motion
‘What am I doing here more than looking – / which I would stop / only to help things through their vanishing’
A Spell For Going Safely Forth By Day
Jynne Martin
‘The hunter pushes a bullet beneath his tongue to fix his aim, / or is it to stave off his thirst?
All the Good Help
Togara Muzanenhamo
‘He will not understand her fascination / for rain, these summer months of water / that somehow keep the money coming in.’
Ange Mlinko | First Sentence
Ange Mlinko
‘I rediscovered the efficacy of meter (or the ‘contrast between fixity and flux’) when I was stuck in a shark tunnel with my kids and was afraid I was coming down with a panic attack.’
Biographical Detail
Ángel González Muñiz
‘The cockroaches in my house complain because I read at night’.
Biscotti Boys / On Men Who Wear Living as Loosely as Their Suits
Momtaza Mehri
‘salmaan the second son & his mama’s seventh seal by way of underwater & underemployment’
Blueberries
James Lasdun
‘I’m talking to you old man. / Listen to me as you step inside this garden’
Come Again/Woods
Maureen N. McLane
‘They party in the woods / as if they were meant for pleasure / not timber.’
Dark Night
Ben Okri
‘On a night when my soul was damp / I found in the street a dark lamp. / The moon was cold and green, / The sky had a sinister sheen’
Darling
Chelsey Minnis
‘It’s dangerous like a very powerful doorbell. / Or a portrait covered with a blanket.’
Dilation
Ben Lerner
‘We need to harness the vaguely erotic disappointment that attends the realization you aren’t being followed.’
Elegy
Sean O’Brien
‘It seems there's no such thing as history. / We must have dreamed the world you've vanished from.’
Eliphaz
Raven Leilani
‘I sent messages in nine point font / arcing through the Internet, asking him / do you believe in our heavenly Father?’
Extinction
Sharmistha Mohanty
‘even more it was a wish for boundless spaces, a wish for the inexpressibly wide and broad, for the unharnessing of human life’ – New poetry by Sharmistha Mohanty.
Fabric
Richard Meier
‘At midnight on our third and final date / I stepped inside her Edwardian conversion / to find a stripped-pine, bookless space.’
from White Butterflies of Night
Jaan Kaplinski
‘I don’t remember whether I believed that I could just / abandon one life to begin another’
Hunters in the Snow
Andrew Motion
‘The hunters have all failed, / the three hunters and their forlorn dogs / now arriving home from the mountain / which thunders above their village’
I had wondered about the signs of burning
John Kinsella
‘None of it made sense. The house shows / no signs – the old core of the house as it is now – / of fire, of giving up the ghost.’
In the village of the mothers
Vénus Khoury-Ghata
‘The wells are kept for the use of the dead who splash the / walls with their silence.’
It was discovered that gut bacteria were responsible
Kathryn Maris
‘Each bacterium was entitled to pay / a fee in the form of mitochondrial energy to purchase / a ‘dream token’ to be dropped into a Potential Well.’
I’m more the drunken slut kind of feminist, or A Treatise on Political Philosophy at the Apex of American Empire
Megan Levad
‘Out of the Zeitgeist / and onto the party barge.’
Meeting the psychiatrist’s wife
Lorraine Mariner
‘The psychiatrist’s wife / has a dress the colour / of that bottle of claret / you shouldn’t have drunk / last night.’
Mouse Trails
Noelle Kocot
‘What I am equipped to do is different / Than what I have been called for.’
