The Last Time I Slept In This Bed

I was involved in the serious business
of ripping apart my own body.

I’d run my fingers over it,
seeking but never finding

the right point of entry,
so having to tear one myself,

though midway through
I’d always tire,

and let night enter
like a silver needle,

sewing my eyelids shut.
This was not an original practice,

but thinking, for a time, that it was
felt like being able to choose

when spring would arrive:
engineering an April

that opened like a parasol,
even in thoroughest winter.

Sara Peters

in my pictures

The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I’m overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains – everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.

Joan Miro Ferra
Twentieth-Century Artists on Art

poet’s toolbox

I haven’t written a rhyming poem now for many years, I seem to have lost my appetite for it but I haven’t lost my pleasure in reading them. I think anybody that insists on the presence of rhyme is really not thinking hard enough about what poetry is or can be.

Having said that, it is important to bear in mind that as poets we have a kind of toolbox, in which there are all kinds of different pieces of equipment, not available to any other kind of writer and rhyme is very importantly one of those.

So never to use rhyme in your poetry would be a bit like buying a car and never getting out of second gear. Use everything in your toolbox.

Andrew Motion
Top 10 tips for being a successful poet