Julian Dobson

The Open Mouse

Blood moon

Between Orion and the Plough
a blink of wing-lights. We
watch our shadow tip
across the moon. In valleys
unwanted light puddles, spreads.
On Stanage Edge the breeze
is fluid as family, the glittered sky
brittle as dried teasels.
Air traffic control is humming,
sketching new constellations.
We forget the names of stars.

Copyright © Julian Dobson 2016

Julian Dobson lives in Sheffield, England, where men call each other ‘duck’. His poems have appeared in publications including Brittle Star, The Interpreters’ House and The Poets’ Republic, and on a bus in Guernsey. He tries to post a poem a week at 52poemsinayear.wordpress.com

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Josephine Corcoran: Featured Poet

The Poetry Shed

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In Town For A Funeral, We Drive Past Our Old House And See It Is For Sale

so we three sisters stumble home and find a widow
wandering from room to room, with a fragile smile,
as if she knows there’s someone missing from our tale.

As we trail graveyard gravel along her doormat she tells us hers:
We moved here to be near the sea but within a year, he’d died.
We say we’re sorry and do not glide across the hallway ice-rink

the way we used to, or lasso our scarves around the banisters, but we slide our dusty shoes
in spirals of our past and, when her back is turned, twirl arthritic fingers
over stories in the walls, lingering in tiny swirls of punctuation, familiar under years of paint.

On the news, balaclava’d, black-clothed men are abseiling again
down white stucco walls, exploding grenades, marking…

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Jinny Fisher – 2 poems

The Poetry Shed

Fish-paste Sandwiches

After Anthony Rudolf’s “Perfect Happiness”

My grandmother wears a floral frock and a grey cardigan, no bra. She doesn’t hug or kiss. The hall smells of damp and lavender. I hang my blazer and satchel from the coat-stand and follow her into the kitchen to sit at the Formica-topped table. There is no heating. Grandmother makes the tea in her Victorian silver teapot and serves it in a rosebud china cup, with a saucer. There are fish-paste sandwiches and a rock bun, which she serves as a treat, but it’s hard to swallow. When I need the lavatory, I can choose between the bathroom upstairs, which is cold, and the one by the back door. That one has spiders in the top corners.

After tea, we go into the sitting room. There is an upright piano, but she doesn’t ask me to play it. We play Bezique, which…

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Lingua Anglica by Jacqui Rowe

I am not a silent poet

European Day at Birmingham Literature Festival

You can time your journey

through this city by how long it takes

to hear a syllable of English. Twenty minutes

is the mean. Korean on the campus, Portuguese

on one end of a phone, laughing Spaniards

teach each other tic-kets on the bus.

Belarusian, Armenian, Hungarian, Bulgarian,

Gagauz, German, Greek, Polish, Moldovan,

Slovak, Yiddish, Russian, Rusyn, Krymchak

Crimean Tatar, Azerbaijani, Karaim, Romani, Romanian

are the languages of Ukraine. Writers war displaced

from Donetsk to Kiev use English to discuss

the role of conflict in their art.

You might fade from Europe. English won’t,

an Italian opines. Expunged of you and angst

and beauty it will morph into convenience.

Innocent of languages,  you won’t stop chasing

subtitles to Welsh and Scandi crime scenes.

Galicians, Poles, Germans, Turks, Swedes have

spoken English to you today. The end of hesitation

is where the poetry lies.

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Lifesaving Poems: Charles Wright’s ‘After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard’

Anthony Wilson

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
up from the damp grass.
Into the world’s tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.

Charles Wright

I first came across this poem via the Poets.org website just after I started blogging on Posterous, around 2010. I did not know what I was doing, but had learned enough…

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10 Classic Autumn Poems Everyone Should Read

The best poems about Fall (or autumn) ‘Now the leaves are falling fast’: so begins W. H. Auden’s ‘Autumn Song’, which features below in this compilation of ten of the best autumn poems in all of En…

Source: 10 Classic Autumn Poems Everyone Should Read