The Friday Poem
A poem every Friday
by Jay Whittaker — Where do I start? / Not with the gut punch, / all my father said / after I came out. //
I’ve deleted his slander from this page. / I choose not to repeat it. / Didn’t he apologise? / Don’t I have the last word? // It was the argument
by Rowan Bell — Dear Daddy, I love you so much / but I don’t want you to come / to my pre-wedding party. You’ll be / there at the lunch, so you mustn’t be glum. // You can go home on the train / and spend a few moments alone / in Tavistock Square
by Nell Prince — The early light is wooly blue / and comes with a buzz: outside / the room a single bee assumes / a sonic prominence, sounds large // against the dusty silences. / It gives the quiet day
by Martyn Crucefix — I will talk of course / but mostly I listen / and at lunchtime / snowflakes crashing down // onto London tarmac / though you’d hardly / call this snow / perhaps even sleet // yet something more / fleecy than hailstones / is making
by Richard Meier — A wide, blank beach in northeast Norfolk, / my young son learning frisbee throws. // A backhand, arrowed from his checkered breast pocket. / A second like it, only one which reaches // the other thrower slower, stalls, / to
by Alexandra Masters — Number 27 have demolished their history. / From the soft gloom of my kitchen I see whistling // men bore the skies with Acrylonitrile, / invade the flight-path of wrens // with neat blocks of happiness. / Click. Now // plastic
by Nicholas McGaughey — At some point someone was moved to / put on canvas something that moved / them towards the easel. These reveries / colour and haunt our walls: some bought, / most bequeathed by the discerning dead / who thought
by John Mee — THE FIRST SCHOOL OF CHARACTER / The most delightful task that can be undertaken by a girl / is to make the home happy. A shovel may be heated red hot / and held over the pie dish. Why not use heather
by Roger Elkin — Imagine her grin’s wicked innocence — / the sly-eyed tightness of her gaze / glazing over in her blear of peering, /her almost show of not knowing // Imagine her wet ferreting-out snout / nuzzling through earth-dust, her maunching at slops
by Christopher Arksey — It was like you’d surfaced after a spell / underwater; spent and roused at the same time, / breathless toward the inevitable / big-reveal of your long-delayed punchline. // Then you let fly — the laugh of someone twice
by Kathryn Gray — February—and I was young. / Spring Street! My blue bag was swinging // in uncommon warmth, even the shadowed / shapes of pavement under awnings // seemed ripe with a peculiar kindness / and promise. The snows, at last
by Jennifer Copley — No one knows where it is. / Maybe behind the sloping granite stones / of Carlingill or in the dip / between Hobdale and the sea? // The old woman who lives there / has been heard cursing anyone who seeks her or her place
