by Caroline Ball Those waxen wings Born of a father’s best-laid plans Weaving some ethereal scheme From an old man’s foolery And you – Borne aloft on fragile fancies Revelling in your flight Your freedom As kingdoms and cities and mountains and oceans and temples and tombs Pass beneath you Sky-born Godlike In the twinkling […]
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by Joel Fraser We beat in time to a rhythmical pulse Attracted to permanence, after all Yet in time will come a rhyme that rings false And the well-built walls of life start to fall Gravity gone, I simply dissipate Innate need for form, now unsatisfied Ground yourselves, cling on, avoid what awaits With gravity […]
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by Joe Gardiner
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by Peter Pencewing What you are about to read is absolutely true and, although it happened to me, it could just as easily have happened to you. You see, last weekend – after a frightfully fearsome week spent in the Bodleian cramming for an essay due at the precise time of 2:37 p.m. on Friday […]
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A pdf of the print version of Issue #23 – Gravity – can be downloaded here: Issue #23 – Gravity
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by Tom Saer the spider tells me with the bulb in his hand I am weaker the dust tells me with her tired eyes I am older the jackal tells me with his little finger I am thinner the little knife tells me with her little blade I am worse I tell you mother […]
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by Alexander Walls Grounded in reality we must be. There is scant point in looking to the stars, To the heavens above, no, we must see Only the ground beneath our feet. It mars Us, that constant force of optimism Which can propel us, call us to action, But this never-ending altruism Can lead to […]
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by Aidan Chivers As clear blue symbols dance before my eyes, And I lie still, my head upon the ground, Each part of me, in dappled sunshine crowned, Wants formal shape in selfish compromise, And hides itself in Nature’s rich disguise – I watch my youthful fragments form a mound Of […]
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by Tobias Thornes ‘Hotel,’ said the border official, pointing to the place I’d left blank on the form. I must have looked conspicuously European as I waited amidst the queues of Malaysians to cross into Thailand, for almost at once he had come and beckoned me into a side office. Britons, as I knew, did […]
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by Alex Waygood. I read the minutes, so you don’t have to. Welcome to ‘Oriel News’, The Poor Print’s new fortnightly roundup of everything big that’s going down in college. As the rust has been scraped from the gears of the Oxford machine and Oriel life has restarted, students could be forgiven for thinking that it […]
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by Amanda Higgin Xanda and I sit at a coffee-shop table, making towers out of sugar cubes. I’ve lost two rounds, Xanda’s lost one and we’re currently drawing with four-high towers. Then, as she carefully places the fifth piece on her stack, it wobbles and scatters across the table. ‘A-ha!’ I laugh maniacally. ‘Things fall […]
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An original composition for piano, by Chris Hill. Download the score here.
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by Shay Vera-Cruz It has a sound: the wide solitude of gravity in the breath between one star & the next. imagine suns, scarce […]
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by Michael Angerer In the beginning was the Fall: drawn down by the implacable forces of nature, down tumbled the apple and down tumbled humanity, Adam, Eve, Newton and all. Ever since, we have looked upwards in expectation of that which is beyond and above our mundane existence: divine inspiration, the fire of Mount Olympus, […]
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by Tom Davy Simmonds is on the stage for Whiplash, a film about drumming and abuse. The academy is giving him a thing which entails the usual sing song about the wife and the crew and sometimes the kids and some trite account of charity and, in the same breath, Hollywood fondlers with some charming […]
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The Poor Print 