This is the last article you can read this month
You can read more article this month
You can read more articles this month
Sorry your limit is up for this month
Reset on:
Please help support the Morning Star by subscribing here
Death is always asking me for poems
Paul McGrane
Death is always asking me for poems,
jealous of the time I spend on politics
and love. It’s not what she needs from
this relationship, she says. The juicy
death she dangles I find so hard to resist.
Like the girl who lost her mother’s hand,
the man who threw his baby from the tower.
The more she demands the more I decline,
even when we reach an anniversary. She’s
tried to simplify the deal, sends me handy
rhyming words for murder, a long list
of lives she’ll claim are accidents of birth
or accidents. She knows that when the living
have read how she must feel she will be happy.
Paul McGrane is the co-founder of Forest Poets in Walthamstow, and The Poetry Society Membership Manager. In 2016 he was Highly Commended in the YorkMix Poetry Competition and Longlisted in the South Bank Poetry Competition.
Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter ([email protected])
Keep up-to-date with newly published poems and other news via our Facebook page.