Tanzania, Dar Es Salaam

He reads the chalked-up list; ‘banana tree’,
‘coconut’ and ‘flower’. Then he smiles.
He’s ten, so he’s the oldest in this class.

I wouldn’t have believed that once. But then,
one day when he was walking with his friend,
wearing his hat to keep the sun away

suddenly a giant grabbed his cap
to cover my lad’s face so he was blind
and could not dodge the blade that chopped his arm.

My son ran to the town to save his flesh.
The myth says spells are cast from body parts.
These rural paths twist traps for boys like him.

A thousand times a thousand times, and more
I’m happy for him to be safe at school.
If he had stayed with me he would be lost.

I miss his smile. He should be here with us.
But when he visits home, what food we make!

Photograph: E.E. Nobbs

But I Should Never Think of Spring
(After Hoagy Carmichael)

You brought a ghost with you, her prints
in the softening earth, her snowy breath
on the windowpane, on the mirrors, but mostly
clinging to the air between us, to our lips,
to the voice of Hoagy Carmichael as he sang
‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’ – you didn’t know
his music but fell when you heard that, saying
you had never heard such a song, saying you wanted
to hear all his songs, your eyes full of soft rain dripping
from leaves, your voice full of sheltering in her arms –
I lay beside you and listened, looking into the dark eyes
of the fox, the dark eyes of the owl and Hoagy singing
it’s not the pale moon that excites me that thrills
and delights me oh no it’s just the nearness
of…

There has been discussion about what a poet is and whether one can confer the title on oneself. I was tentative for a long time about calling myself a poet. Many say a poet is someone who writes poems. But what makes something a poem? When I was a very young poet (13 or 14), I used to show my work to people and ask’ is this a poem?’ by which I meant ‘does it do what poems are meant to do, is it magic?’That is why I don’t believe in bad poems, if it’s bad, it’s not a poem. William Carlos Williams said ‘if it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem’.
By calling oneself a poet, if one simply means that one writes poems, I don’t have an issue with that. But the secondary definition is that a poet is a ‘person with great imagination and creativity’. I…

Roundel Poetry Competition 2015
Roundel is a Poetry Society Stanza

Judge: Susan Wicks

First Prize: £200 Second Prize: £100 Third Prize: £50

Entry fee: £3 per poem. No entry form needed. Open to anyone aged 18 or over. Poems are welcome on any subject. There is no limit to the number of entries per person. Each poem should be typed on a single A4 sheet. Your name must not appear on the poem. Please enclose a separate A4 sheet with your name, contact details, email address and title(s) of your poem(s).
Closing date: 31 May 2015. Postal entries only.

RULES

Poems must be:

the entrant’s original work
written in English
no longer than 40 lines (not including title or dedication)
unpublished and not already accepted for publication

Poems will be judged anonymously and the judge will see each piece. No entrant may win more than one prize. Winners will be…

How to maximise your chances of getting your poems accepted for publication

The current issue of The New Writer features interviews with three poetry magazine editors, which includes the following statistics:-

• Envoi magazine features 20 – 30 poets each issue, 400 – 500 poets will have submitted poems.
• Other Poetry publishes 200 poems from 3500 – 4000 submitted.

In other words, both poetry magazines only accept around 5% of poems submitted.  This is actually generous as some poetry magazines accept as little as 2% of poets submitted.  So how can you increase your poems’ chances of being accepted in such a tough market?

Read Poetry Magazines

Better still, subscribe to a few.  Although poetry magazines generally don’t favour subscribers when selecting poems for publication, subscribing to as many magazines as you can means that there will be a market for your work.

Reading poetry magazines will also give you an…

one day i begged at the corner of my street
but no one understood:
only a drop of sunshine please,
it costs half a dollar by tram
to get out from the shadow of civilized ghettos,
to renounce my cornflakes with yogurt,
only half a dollar for the 13th hour tram,
even if lonely women are conspicuous in city parks;
some people give tens of dollars to watch movies at the mall
and they are allowed to,
others give hundreds of dollars for iPhones
because they have who to talk to…
but only the heart, decent folks,
the heart mends with sunshine,
otherwise it becomes suspect
of a cancer not discovered yet,
or maybe the human himself grows leaves
in his entrails for always
in the shade of cold concrete
where only the sun costs half a dollar…