Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Poetry

Inheritance

Sadaf Halai

‘It made the sound of / a small balloon dropping.’

Black Against the Sky, the Giant Mothers

Selima Hill

‘Black against the sky the giant mothers / are whispering together in the moonlight’

The Easel

Sharon Olds

‘When I build a fire, I feel purposeful.’

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.’

Why A Colored Girl Will Slice You If You Talk Wrong About Motown

Patricia Smith

‘Their newborn children grew / like streetlights. We grew like insurance payments. / We grew like resentment.’

Yakisoba

Hiromi Itō

‘Who connects with the next woman / With tens and hundreds and thousands of women.’

New Hotel Krakow

Adam Zagajewski

‘Now someone else lives in that apartment, / strange people, the scent of a strange life.’

A poem by Adam Zagajewski.

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.’

PK 754

Yasmeen Hameed

‘Tell me, what is this cry of pain in the air?’

Remembered Summer

Troy Jollimore

‘Our conversations faltered, the celestial musicians / took a break between sets, and all the little engines / we had so painstakingly gathered and constructed / lapsed into stillness for a few brief moments.’

On Jupiter Place

Nicholas Christopher

‘I didn’t know who she was anymore / maybe I never did or could –’