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Poetry
A space for poems, spoken pieces, and collections shaped by pressure, memory, fracture, and feeling.
Browse by collection, spoken work, theme, or recency.
A surreal speculative poem about a child, erased play, and a bureaucratic world that turns memory, language, and belonging into terms of service.
An elegy for Dexter, a Yorkie whose loyal, comic presence carried one family through hard times, children and the everyday rituals of home.
A first-morning Eden poem about embodied autonomy, privacy, reflection, naming and the first relation between two people who meet as unfinished equals.
A quiet Eden evening poem about trust, privacy, surprise, desire without possession, and the right of two people to rest without an audience.
A cosmological poem about light and darkness as complementary conditions, and rest as a necessary part of making rather than evidence of failure.
A departure poem about grief, memory, limits, inherited guilt and the uncertain work of carrying a damaged world forward.
A mythic fall poem about shame, grievance and self-built hell: a ruined leader refuses an open moral threshold and enters the garden through its service current.
An image-led poem of a central figure, raised phones and a warm bulb, where the room resists becoming only a collection of frames.
A surreal, image-led poem of joined hands, burning flower heads and a distant moon.
A rain-dark underpass poem about misread permission, silence and the petrol-coloured reflection left beneath a bridge.
An underpass poem of waiting, withheld confession and rain remaking the place where two people could not speak.
A border-road song and poem about a guitarist who arrives for a gunfight, hears three notes from a back room, and chooses to leave the gun in the floorboards.
A wind-led landscape poem in which a woman's coat becomes a second body and the weather briefly takes shape.
A quiet landscape poem about a back-turned figure, geological scale, and a river continuing beyond the edge of the visible world.
A domestic poem of rain, a half-packed bag and a kettle, where care changes the room without pretending the damage is gone.
A surreal coastal poem about inherited exits, impossible thresholds, and a key that begins to feel usable without opening anything.
A quiet domestic poem about waiting, absence, and making one small room visible without pretending anyone is coming through.
An urban dusk poem where rain, glass and reflected fire turn ordinary office windows into an omen.
A nocturnal city poem balancing rescue and ruin through a rain-soaked hero, sleepless windows and brooms that uncover sky.
A dark free-verse poem about staged emergencies, the need to be needed, and the dangerous intimacy between rescue and control.
A surreal domestic weather poem about inherited damage, damp rooms, and a wall admitting a little sky.
A disruptive urban fable in which a loose bolt exposes the panic inside a carefully ordered city.
A restrained free-verse poem about guarded contact, need, and the small courage of not turning away.
A reflective free-verse poem about leaving, inherited commands, fear, and the room that opens when obedience falls quiet.
Poetry themes
Each stream gathers poems by mood, music, pressure, and the kind of attention the piece asks for.
Poems that walk the fault lines: grief, rupture, war, urban grit, and the mythic underbelly of the everyday. Expect charged images, stark music, and hard turns that don’t tidy the mess so much as name it.
Editor’s picks and special spotlights: the poems, sequences, and craft notes we think deserve your front-row gaze. Rotating highlights, seasonal themes, and one-off gems that show the range of our community.
Poems grouped by this theme.
Where verse meets melody. Poems arranged as songs, chants, and soundscapes—complete with audio players, lyric sheets, and credits for collaborators. Expect live takes, studio mixes, and experiments that let the poem sing in new registers.
Field notes of the inner and outer world: weather, seasons, land, and the quiet revolutions of thought. Lyrical attention, ecological awareness, and a contemplative pace define this stream.
Wit with teeth. Irony, parody, and mischief aimed at power, pretence, and the status quo. Formal play and punchy line breaks welcome; the laugh should leave a bruise.
Work of resilience and renewal: poems about survival, kinship, faith (in any form), and the long arc of becoming. Clear cadence, steady light, and endings that open rather than preach.
Dream-logic, fabulism, and mythic visitations. Reality bends, symbols speak, and images carry more than one meaning. The goal is wonder and unease in equal measure.
Poetry in isiZulu, alongside careful translations where offered. A home for imagery, izibongo (praise poetry), and contemporary voices that carry rhythm and story. Submissions may appear bilingual to welcome wider readers.
65 entries across poetry.
23 entries across poetry.
1 entries across poetry.
1 entries across poetry.
2 entries across poetry.
1 entries across poetry.
Poetry began here as play with words, fragments, and unlikely connections. Over time it became a record of feeling, then a way of making sense without forcing neat explanations too early.
Some pieces are more instinctive. Some are more controlled. None of them are interested in pretending the human experience arrives tidy.
These poems are not written to hand over a single fixed meaning. They are written to hold image, pressure, contradiction, and the parts of experience that resist summary.
Read them slowly or read them in a rush. Read them in sequence if you want to notice how the voice shifts over time. Read them out of order if you want the cleaner shock of recognition.
If a poem leaves you with a clearer feeling rather than a cleaner answer, it has done its job.
Some poems also live in voice.
Where a spoken version exists, it should feel like an extension of the page rather than a separate performance layer. The voice is there to carry the pressure of the line, not distract from it.
Collections gather poems by atmosphere, season, pressure, or recurring thread.
Enter a collection when you want a more sustained mood than the main archive offers, or when you want to stay with a particular register a little longer.