MAY Poems of the Month

Congratulations to Sam Tongue for the winning poem Bone Garden, and well done to the shortlisted poems featured in this post. May was feral, funny, and full of feeling.

We invited your poems to touch grass or launch into orbit. You sent us constellations and compost, ancestors and algorithms, gardens, grief, and James Dean’s tombstone. The result? One hell of a shortlist.

Congratulations to Sam Tongue for the winning poem Bone Garden, and well done to our shortlisted poems by Stephanie Feeney, Sophia Argyris, JP Seabright, Sylvie Jane Lewis, and Kathy Pimlott, ranging from drought-stricken hillsides to television-lit bedrooms, hand-trimmed lawns and community-phoenix gardens. They question AI, hold the potential of loss in their teeth, and reference ancestors beneath oak trees. Each one carries a spark of memory, rebellion, or strange tenderness and we’re proud to celebrate them here.

Thank you to everyone who took the risk to submit.
Thank you for your craft, your weirdness, your honesty. We’re grateful you’re writing.
Keep going.

Read the winning poem and shortlisted selection for our Monthly POET Competition.

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THE WINNING POEM

Part spell, part elegy, part soil-stained love letter, Bone Garden invites us to kneel, dig, and inhale the strange beauty of what lies beneath. Sam Tongue’s poem is an offering to the living and the dead: a wild, tender excavation of memory, mortality, and the mythic mess of being alive: a hymn to decay, dirt, and deep remembering.

A vivid, visceral winner. Take off your shoes. Walk barefoot through this one.

Bone Garden
Samuel Tongue

If you’ve made it this far you’re winning
and can take off your shoes, walk barefoot
on holy ground – grass as sticky-back plastic –
toast yarrow’s marshmallow puffery. It’s not
a competition. Memento mori even
amongst these illustrious dead. Gaze on
this sandstone skull splitting
slowly in each heat and freeze, heat and freeze,
still living on, a seasonal breathing
in its clippered bed. They say
that the resurrection men hunted
here, sniffing out the freshly interred
to sell on like fat Chaise Longues,
spilling their stuffing. But there’s more,
a hungry treasure buried under these mossy crossbones.
Kneel, dig your fingernails into the earth, right to the mooning
cuticles, then raise them to your nose: your brain sparks
bacterial and your tongue sparks bacterial,
an umami muddy chemistry that is our home.
Breathe deeply into this bone garden, here
where the glorious perfume of the living
and the dead blooms from our earthy bodies;
and know that you are loved by all
the creatures on the sweet breeze.

Shortlisted Poems.

Parched Oak trees cup their leaves anticipating rain in this portrait of familial love. New life moves through a landscape of desperation where grass is no longer green.

Drought
Stephanie Feeney

On the fifty-seventh day without rain,
my parents brave the road. Even the weeds
hang their heads. Dad’s arms tremble
as he reaches to take you. Mom says
she’s not driving back up that road
till she leaves, and I say, Good. Don’t –
leave, I mean. Wasps hover near my nipple
for a rogue spray of milk when you feed.
The hills look still at a glance, but watch,
really watch, and they move. It’s the trees,
which have lost all their green.
Every leaf on every branch of every oak
is tremoring. Brittle beggars, heads bowed,
cups extended.

Sensuous, sly, and orbiting intimacy this poem looks skyward and inward all at once.

Hellbent on starlight
Sophia Argyris

I stand too upright as always, despite how our country
encourages a slouch, despite how I don’t love it
when the barista remembers my order.

We made a promise not to go spineless.
When we catch sight of ourselves in mirrors
our profiles cold orbit but we know each other

intently, in and out of bed. Hellbent, yes
and upright, also ringing like a Tibetan bowl.
A clear night, my thirst for Cassiopeia quenched.

You stayed indoors under television’s false light
so you don’t to see me swallow Orion’s belt, Ursa Minor
catch in my throat. The warmth of you still

on my upper left arm. The rest feels cold
in comparison. I mostly think desperate thoughts
in the morning. By evening I’m moderately calm.

This strange and tender ritual of apology to grass seems lighthearted, but it’s a miniature epic about guilt, attention, and the strange stories we grow beneath us.

Leaves the Grass
JP Seabright

I am trimming the grass with the nail scissors.
They are a little blunt, but this is for the best.
I have waited three days for the grass to dry.
A further three days to wait for Thursday.
This is by far the best day to cut the grass.
No, not cut, but trim, a number four all over.
I have not given the grass much attention for months.
It is understandably angry with me.
Turning from green to yellow to red.
Like a traffic light.
I get down on my knees and ask for forgiveness.
I tell the grass I’m sorry I’ve left it so long.
That it will be quick to trim it.
But this is another lie, it will take me all day.
And into the night.
Last year I set it on fire.
Turning from red to brown to black.
I kneel on its soft green pillow and begin to snip.
It is back breaking work, but I deserve it.

This poem swerves from meme cats to moonlit hares demanding that we look closer, not at the artificial, but at the intricate, embodied intelligence of the natural world. A timely submission in an age of artificial distraction, Lewis’s poem is a shape-shifting meditation on survival, motherhood, and the irreproducible wild.

The Problem with AI
Sylvie Jane Lewis

is that it cannot be a hare, moon-steeped and petrified.
That its art, reproduced to profusion, cannot be anything

but smooth, saturated surface. For hares, though uniform
in their husks, are motley in their intricacies. The hare’s

black-tipped ears poke out from the grass and are her ears
and the ears of every hare in the world; for repetition

to a hare is survival. That it leaches; that it is everywhere
on LinkedIn, the most plasticized of platforms. That it makes

an em-dash look like a forced pause — a bridge between
masturbatory voids: I hired a candidate with zero experience —

here’s why. For a hare pauses in safe moments, unseen by fox
or falcon. For an em-dash is her lifeline, is solitude, is an interlude

to suckle her leverets, to turn into a swamp witch and back
again. That it generates the t-shirts of supermarket dads:

meme cats scream behind trolley bars in the guise of Munch-
meets-Van-Gogh. For a hare is a master of superfetation,

inventing more of herself while already multiplying. For hares
have known for millennia that regeneration is an art.

That it is fickle. Frida Kahlo was born in 1900 or 1907,
depends when you ask, depends on the height of the sun.

That Warhol would’ve loved it, lazy bastard. For a hare
does not flit between coordinates; for she bolts into horizons,

into heather, into the next day, holding a history in the thunder
of her heart. That it can write a ‘Plath poem’: wilting roses,

burning skies and pomegranates. That our planet is burning.
For a hare shapeshifts through the farmland, sculpts

a hundred homes. For she creates, for she wavers —
for a hare is a kaleidoscope of being.

A gentle rebellion. Rats, bees, backing trucks, and salvias fill this city-centre garden with nonhuman resilience.

The Phoenix Community Garden
Kathy Pimlott

In working hours it’s occupied by bees and hoverflies,
insistent on whatever flowers high and low, purple salvias,
honeysuckle draping the fence. Covert and muscular rats
agitate the compost bins and a gang of sparrows makes
bushes loud. Outside, an artic’s backing track proclaims
reversal. Inside, this space, conjured by common will
and spade, holds its breath so as not to alert the brickwork.

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VERVE POEM OF THE MONTH COMPETITION

Huge thanks to everyone who submitted
Submissions are now open June 1st.
Theme? Freedom. (Optional, always.)

• £100 prize

• £3 per poem | £6 for 3 poems

• Submissions open: June 1st

• Deadline: June 20th

• Judged by: Stuart Bartholomew & Hayley Frances

Submission details and how the money supports our free community poetry projects: vervepoetryfestival.com/poem-of-the-month

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Want to submit to next months Poem of the Month but need to write a poem? Come to a VERVE Workshop?

We’d love for you to join us for future sessions. The next instalment of VERVE’s Workshop Series features the likes of Jane Yeh, The Emma Press, Jennifer Wong, Isabelle Baafi, Tim Tim Cheng, Hannah Copley, and Clare Pollard. Book your spot here, or keep an eye on vervepoetryfestival.com and our socials for updates on upcoming events, competitions, 2026 festival programme and workshops.

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Upcoming:

• Subscribe to our Substack for more writing like this.

• Explore our VERVE workshop series.

• Visit our Bookshop to support poetry that matters.

Hayley Frances
Co-Director, VERVE Poetry Festival
vervepoetryfestival.com