Loft

It was a conversion, once a part of the city walls,
the docks where spices were unloaded.
Gangmasters wrote messages on walls
lists of cargoes to be stacked into
ships that pulled up to the wharves,
that are unseen from this high window
with its railings, once anchoring hoists,
now converted to faux-balconies.
The dark boards throw up essence
of cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, clove,
despite a coat of varnish wearing thin in places.

I’ve only rented, can’t afford to buy
the price of these apartments is sky-high.
That’s why this room’s so bare
no new paint or plaster’s sheen is glinting in the light.
I hung this mirror by the name I found
scratched on the back wall.
I think it is “Jim Walters”, not really sure.
Now it has faded like the measure drawn
just at the edge of the mirror’s frame.

Carolyn O’Connell lives in Richmond-on-Thames.  Her…

Genealogy

Ich bin Englanderin
My mother’s great-grandfather had to leave
when they said his family name belonged to the enemy…
Tá mé bean na Fraince
..they spat upon his wife in the street
and hanged her dog on the garden gate.
Je suis irlandaise
My father’s great-grandfather had to leave
when potatoes turned to mush in the ground…
yo soy una mujer alemana
..his wife brought up sixteen children
without asking the parish for a penny.
I am an Englishwoman. With these voices in my genes
I cannot understand why an Englishman must shout
immigrants, go home.

Registers

Monday, and Mrs Hill
calls out the register. You answer loudly,
sit straight up, and see
a big red tick. But when she calls
“Sureya”, there is silence.

Tuesday, and no Sureya. Mrs Hill begins
to call her name, then stops.
And later, in the playground
Sureya’s brother isn’t there.
You see your best friend James, and Marta,
and play with them.

Thursday. Sureya’s birthday.
You drew a card for her: a girl
with yellow hair and long pink dress
with a pink yo-yo, but you haven’t thought
who the girl is. She’s not Sureya
who has black hair and a blue dress.
Sureya spins a yo-yo too, and skips, best in the class.
Mum bought a present for Sureya. She grumbled
that presents are for parties. But Sureya’s poor
and can’t have parties at her house.
Mum bought a necklace with pink beads
and wrapped it up in…

If your poem is struggling and refusing to breathe, here are some things you might try, to revive it and massage its heart:

1) Change the tense. Quite often present tense can make it more immediate.

2) Lose the first stanza: sometimes that’s just gearing up.

3) Look at your ending. Are you trying too hard to point up a moral? Chop it.

4) Look at your order and structure. Sometimes the ending needs to be the start.

5) Check out individual words. Is the one you have used the very, best most accurate word?

6) Consider changing the form. A free verse poem sometimes wants to be a formal poem. I speak from experience. I once had a poorly draft. Then I noticed there were two or three lines of iambic pentameter. The poem was telling me it was a sonnet. And when I listened to it, it wrote…

Part 1.

This post has nothing at all to do with the process of writing or with enjoying writing. But, regardless of whether you enjoy submitting to magazines or not, if you want to get your work published, you will need, at some point, to try and learn and understand as much as you can about the process. And you will need to become organised and methodical if you want to increase your chances of publication.
A few years ago I started to send my work out to magazines.
I was somewhat anxious.

I wondered if any of my poems were any good.  I was in love with one or two. I wondered which magazines to send too. Should aim high or low? Because my mate, Pete, thought my poems were great, perhaps the editor of Shoot the Moon would too? Not that I’d ever seen a copy of Shoot the Moon, or any other poetry magazine at that point.

I…

Thrown by a withered hand
a slick of hate pollutes the world
its net enslaves the innocent
rape, death and silence is its goal.

The face belonging to the hand
remains hidden while the young die,
seduced by promises of eternal life
their bodies wrecked by hate’s shrapnel.

This Ebola of the mind corrupts – its spores
reshaping faith, culture to its cause;
rejecting those who give their all
to bring health, happiness, joy and empathy.

Fighting for an omnipotent Creator,
who needs no man’s defence
and holy men who sleep in peace;
seduced by hate they crave love.

Taking Flight

Rafters trap the booming sky
and soar, in a hand-held video
of the factory’s last days. The camera
cranes to follow flaking uprights,
yellow-painted, through the chill.
Holed access roads unravel knots
of sheds, a wingspan wide, the roosts
of Hunters, Harriers and Hawks.

Its old name sticks. The Hawker
estate’s rebuilt as cul-de-sacs,
its villas illustrate a cellular
subdivision: each a powerhouse.
Jump jets recast as MPVs,
commuters hum on honeysuckle currents,
flying in and out, industrious,
as if the hangar has become a hive.
View from the Hill

I could convince myself
we drew the river’s curve
right there, and wound
it across the water meadow
with its flourish of buttercups,
just for the pleasure
of clothing our story
in cow parsley and hawthorn,
and of letting May’s fresh energy
propel us further upstream,
beyond the tidal surge,
past a trio of fruit trees,
flawlessly blooming;