Poetry

This Dark Art If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow, and which will not. Speak. - Macbeth, Act 1...

Synopsis People are taking sedatives in boats Going to America. Their names drift back to me— Hollowed out, unpronounceable. I walk through the crowds in the arcades And on the...

I grow lighter for you with each striptease from skin to skin leaving a glimmering bulb a milk light by your bed for you to undress by or find your...

No map traces the street Where those two sleepers are. We have lost track of it. They lie as if under water In a blue, unchanging light, The French...

What Follows Deer cull, Wytham 7th February 2015 A moment’s pause before a fist of swallows spooks the sky above the nearest trees. Something shakes the fence-bound rows, bursts through...

-for Heaney and the Peace Bridge Grey and greying sky reflected in choppy body, as our matching heron performs his balancing act for all to see. The Donegal hills,...

Lifesaving They don’t do it anymore, breathe into the mouth to save. We had learnt it reluctantly, lined up beside a recumbent dummy, waiting to take our turn to...

Excerpts from a previously unpublished sequence of poems named The Year of the Pin-Up Calendar. February there is a white pigeon opened like a book on the...

Yesterday we spoke to artist and poet Momtaza Mehri, who has recently been announced as Young People’s Laureate for London, who will take over from poet and musician Caleb Femi in the role which was launched by Spread The Word Last Year.

October Pizza bruschetta gold dress Rioja Autumn is here and Winter forgotten Walking through town arm in arm with a lover Moon in the sky and leaves good...

                        To Fady Joudah I was waiting at the platform For a train to Calcutta In...

The following poem is taken from the anthology Tales of Two Londons: Stories from a Fractured City, ed. Claire Armitstead, Arcadia Books, London, 2019. Ferdous...

White trunks divide the dark beside the line and in the dusk trees pause since if they do not move they cannot see themselves or know this moment has...

SUFFER THE COUNTRY   Suffer the curled up corpses of the tortured Suffer the cluttered ranks of the bound and the beaten Suffer the pleading eyes of those...

I The Lagan - a muddy silt river - Barrel of roll-tide, ribs of clean branches Poke up water jutting. On the towpath I glean a warm wet...

after Wu Hao’s Duke Cups The china cup is frilled at the rim like tired lace and all over it ceramic tentacles extend to whisper if you drink...

        let me persist but not divide        let me sit quietly with        the tiniest    ...

For Najwan Darwish A lucky three-year-old Is Saher* Abu Namous If Gaza didn’t explode The world would have Known nothing of him Now he is all in reports One among the...

The People's Forest — a literary strand to Waltham Forest's programme as the first ever London Borough of Culture this year — has recently...

Leave the world alone and close the door, seal this room from everything outside, nothing else exists but these four walls; we have eight hours and five...

Snowbound Carriages lit and still between the drifts ... With each flake it took on a new form, the city they seemed exiled from --- almost a sad,...

Two Poems, Philip Larkin London Magazine / January 1970 / Vol.9 No.10     Philip Larkin, (1922-1985) a prolific poet and writer of essays,...

I It’s just the same old air a person breathes, roughly the same respiratory system, steady compared with ours, the same idea of hindrance (flesh the breath must...

Can you rinse away this city that lasts like blood on the bitten tongue? ~ Agha Shahid Ali Delhi, where parrots lift the weight of tombs, poets offer daggers to deepen...