A selection from some of featured poets...
Brush Strokes
Eva is an artist.
She paints chromosomes.
The gene for love, coloured red
lies close to the telomere
on chromosome five
next to envy
green as cat's eyes.
Hope is polygenic,
scattered through the genome
like gold dust.
Anne Osbourn
His Voice
Growling as he sleeps,
his own sinking world's ground-bass.
His voice is like the memory
of gunnery practice out at sea.
Dark brother
of the swill and pound and chatter
way beyond the cockle bight,
ocean's mouth
ancient and still promising
to deceive.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
Morning Room
The family sits round the table
ready for the meal, which is me
trussed up at the ankles and wrists,
cooked to a golden finish like a chicken.
Uncle Philip as head of the family
sharpens the knife, carves slices
of flesh from my thighs and deftly
transfers them to oven-warmed plates.
Now everyone gets stuck into the broccoli
and potatoes. They are pouring gravy,
spooning stuffing from my rib cage.
Martin Figura
Winter Finding: Maeshowe
The year's low country.
Sun rolls, sky rises and is long gone.
Not to see the framing steepness
you lower your head.
You are line.
A form of utterance from last to next
no more than murmur
as light pulls into the seed of itself
a held breath
your body, an earthbound chamber.
Why rush past into whiteness?
This is the birth of the dark half,
the serpent days of seem.
Scribbles of lust and brag
speak like needles on the skin.
Lavinia Greenlaw
Something and Nothing
If you had known how little
you would have had to give
to drum into this brittle
hope the desire to live,
would you have changed the venue,
your greeting or your tone,
or planned things better when you
knew we'd have hours alone,
and if you heard a hollow
voice spit these ill-advised
questions, would nothing follow?
I wouldn't be surprised.
Sophie Hannah
The Right Place
You've fetched a duvet and laid it
lightly over the shoulders
of someone beside you who's slipped
unwittingly into sleep.
And drifting off yourself
on a sofa somewhere you've sensed
the same weight settle and known
how the warmth around you will soon
deepen your sleep. And that's something,
whatever else you've done or not done.
Michael Laskey
The Bridge
Above all else, the bridge must stand. Must bear
the traffic and the wind - their flow and stress
within its tensile span. And so the engineer
builds up his lines within a frame of gravity
and physics. Weighs extravagant aesthetics
with tolerance of corded steel. With bolts
and hawsers. Mud-sunk pilings deep as islands.
Then tarmac and cement to bind, which raise
the whole to sense and life - this string of quartz
across a darkened bay - from noun to verb, from
that to this - suspended here by luck or daring,
simply air. Humming, self-reliant now. Alive
with superstructure winds. Cars whipping by.
Andre Mangeot
Fife
Another day forfeits its light
to the barbarous moon
and leaves us listening to the sea
carving away with its blade of sighs.
What might we taste tomorrow?
What might be done of all we lie
hoping in the dark to do?
Darling, open the window.
Let the sea breathe into our room.
Jacob Polley
The Swifts
Powered by screams
and the black bat twist of their wings,
they slice through the insect cloud.
Heavenly dogfight, no quarter given,
the plunder ravished unseen.
Round they come again,
cyclists on a bend
clinging to their manic carousel.
The air cannot hold them.
The sun slips from their sleek
gunmetal backs.
They are gods.
Will Stone
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