Poetry: Short Stories to Read

What the Ice Does Before It Breaks

by ErikL

A lyric prose poem follows a pond through the full arc of freezing and thaw, from November's first skin of ice to April's last dissolving plates. A narrator who is both field scientist and poet reads the ice as a language, finding in its seasonal transformation an unspoken metaphor for endurance, silence, and change. The abrupt, incomplete final line deepens the poem's sense of unresolved becoming.

What the Beekeeper's Widow Knows About Silence

by MansourAlQahtani

A beekeeper's widow grieves in her own quiet way, rejecting communal mourning rituals in favor of solitary dawn visits to her late husband's hives. In the hum and warmth of the bees she finds a wordless prayer and the slowly-forming understanding that loss is not absence but a pressure that holds heat long after its source is gone. The story closes mid-sentence, as if the thought — like grief — cannot quite be finished.

Poem for a Language I'm Losing

by Adriana

The lyrical voice traces the gradual loss of Portuguese across three generations – from a mother who still counts in her native tongue, to the speaker's own estrangement, to a daughter who was never taught the language. Through quiet domestic images, the poem conveys a deep, wordless grief over a lost linguistic home. It closes with the image of water slipping through fingers – a loss recognized too late.

What Stays in the Hospital Room

by Hannelore

A lyrical text depicts keeping vigil at a mother's hospital bedside – the mechanical beeping, still hands, counting ceiling tiles. The narrator waits for the mother to wake and call them by their real name, while life outside continues indifferently. Everything distills into the realization that love sometimes means nothing more than staying.

What the Ice Still Knows

by Lars

A lyrical poem about the retreating ice of a fjord, told through a child's memories and a father's embodied knowledge of the land. It meditates on the loss of indigenous wisdom and language that disappears alongside the natural world it once described. Writing becomes a final act of witnessing — not to save the ice, but to remember that it once sang.

Time Signature for a Sourdough

by Cormac

An Irish baker and former musician processes his band's breakup in a refrain-driven poem, finding in the rhythm of bread-making a new, quieter measure for patience and collaboration.

Marking

by ErikL

A Swedish forest ranger describes, in five poems, marking trees for harvest, a bark-beetle infestation, and handing a forty-year-old stand to the next generation – a meditation on care, numbers, and what stewardship actually means.

Three in the Morning, Accra / Vienna

by amara_osei

A night poem. Three in the morning in Vienna and Accra simultaneously. Mother and daughter connected by what neither says.

Topography of an Arrival

by amara_osei

An arrival poem in seven parts. Vienna, the first night, Heimweh, northern light, the silent city. Amara arrives.

What love is like at 58

by lena_brenner

Lena compares love at 28, 34 and 58. Less fear through more loss. Finite love as the only true kind.

Homesickness (the word that does not exist)

by amara_osei

Amara compares the German word Heimweh with the Twi word ɔhaw — pain versus burden. An essay-poem about living in a foreign language.

The Light on Katendrecht

by Pieter

November 2016, no camera: the light on Katendrecht's old warehouses does something unrepeatable for four minutes. Pieter watches. A photograph exists after you do. The light exists only in his memory. It was his light on his buildings — and he didn't keep it.

Northern Lights

by Helga

Helga has seen the northern lights around two hundred times. Do you get used to them? Not entirely. You get used to the fact of them. But when you properly look — the green, the movement — you still have no category for it. After two hundred times, still not.

Three in the Morning

by Cormac

Cormac starts at three in the morning. That hour has a quality no other has. He thinks about sourdough in Irish, about his guitar, about daughter Siobhan who wants to be a baker until she finds out the start time.