Recognition   It’s time to welcome the magnolia, her pink flushed cups, petals tight on black twigs, her cold courage, a clench of fuck yous aimed at […]

        The Smallest Distillery in Scotland   Donaghy found me behind the whisky stills and suffered my story: faith, boiled down to a mash of schoolboy memory – […]

        New Delhi, Beyond the AQI   The king’s lane, papayawhip-paved. Smog on the lemonade children. By November, everything underwater. Crop-burn and tobacco clouds on evening sounds: fast-car […]

        Thất Tịch   Seventh Month, Saigon, 1975   They share a dish of beans like small blood clots, believing they will one day wake to a tea […]

        Figures in a Landscape   Remember when the country offered a pathway to freedom? The creek lanes and brooks and railway arches, spaces we filled with imagination […]

  To mark the publication day of his Vapour Trails: Reviews and Essays on Poetry (Shoestring Press), Wild Court is featuring four new poems by John Greening. The first three […]

          Mephitine   You will know me before you see me, will sense me from twenty paces. I am all sour milk top-notes, that pissy catch in […]

        I remember   you were the first man who taught me about death. I was five years old; we were walking across the fields to my school. […]

        Golf Behind Trees   An elegant course is exposed by newly opened air. There used to be a thick hedge, armed with trees. We would hear the […]

        On the margin   On the margin of existence on the deep-sea floor between chimneys of boiling water and venting carbon where no life should sensibly occur […]

image © Dirk Skiba         Sonnet for the British-Born   And suddenly, new language: ‘British-Born’, for kids who grew up on terraces in Leeds or tower blocks in […]

        Arachnid: Flight After Deluge   The waters have risen; the signal has sounded in our skeletons of minimal composition. An instinct of age-old urgency has stirred our […]

        In an Orchard   Shall we drink a while and think of Eden, As in an orchard filled with waspy windfalls Children shout and run? Late summer […]

        The Village that Vanished   All the bitter day waves smash into Smugglers’ Cove and Byer’s Hole. The sky has failed to lift and a shipwright’s hoolie […]

        Six Months Away   (After Robert Lowell)   Discharged as ‘homeless’, then to a room that felt wilfully hostile (lurid curtains and bristling carpet squares), I was […]

        My father believes in Triclavianism   Inner parts of a grinder, Dead batteries, bulbs, Steel tub of a washer, A few metal strings, A toaster without the […]