I’m delighted to have a third poem published in the Edge of Humanity online magazine.
https://edgeofhumanity.com/2026/01/14/living-in-limbo/
Living in Limbo
poetry
Dementia
I’m delighted to have another poem published on Edge of Humanity Magazine.
https://edgeofhumanity.com/2025/12/10/dementia/
The Hat
I’m really delighted that one of my poems, called The Hat, has been published on Edge of Humanity online magazine.
Please follow the link:
https://edgeofhumanity.com/2025/10/30/the-hat/
Your Garden is not Your Garden (with a nod to Kahlil Gibran)
When I first came across Kahlil Gibran’s poem, On Children, back in the 1980s, I was taken by the way in which those words are a guide to parenting. He said:
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and the daughters of life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”
As I looked at the images caught on my trail camera in the garden, it struck me that, similarly, our gardens are not our gardens. We are merely their custodians for a period of time. Badgers have lived where my garden resides for many more years than I have; foxes too. It’s a humbling thought and one I hold as I go about tending my garden, ensuring there is water for the wildlife, flowers for the bees to seek pollen, safe places for hedgehogs.
My garden is not my garden. I share it with many others and I feel privileged to do so.
Fox July 2025
The Garden
Give me a mutiny of colour
Discordant in harmony
Where pollen drenched bees
Plunge flower heads
©️Liz Mackenzie
Symphony
Drip, drip
Drop, drop
Five, ten, twenty, more
Plip, plip
Plop, plop
Trees whisper, encore.
Birds sing their lilting chorus
As flowers sway
To rain’s symphony.
©️ Liz Mackenzie
Hello again
On Saturday, I went to the Hello Again Show at Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham. This is the story of Neil Diamond through his songs. Neil Diamond was a great favourite of my mum. She had all his CDs and once, when her house was broken into, was more distraught that they’d stamped on, and broken, one of the CD cases than anything that may have been stolen. We played Hello Again at her funeral in 2017. This poem is about how a song can touch us and bring back memories, happy or sad.
Hello again tears start to fall,
cascade to music’s rhythm,
slideshow casts a shadow,
reaches pain of loss
and all the days, the months
years now fall together,
implode to a single song,
hello, again, hello.
© Liz MacKenzie
The photo is my mum, taken in 2016
Scurry
Ghostly they dance the night sky
screech their moonlit song
scour a city for overfed waste as
tides turn for another million years
©️ Liz Mackenzie
Front Runner
Today, at my creative writing group, we did a short writing exercise whereby the person next to you gave you a word (any word) and you had to write no more than 50 words, starting with “I love you” and incorporating the given word. All a bit valentine’s day, thought I; I don’t ‘do’ valentines day but, ever game for a writing challenge, here is my offering with thanks to Elizabeth for a lovely word.
Front Runner
I love you snowdrop, you peek out when
all is grey and Christmas is over.
You’re a front runner
the prelude to Spring
You don’t announce your arrival with
a fanfare, just shyly say, “hi”.
You are my hope
my dare to dream defender
I love you snowdrop
© Liz Mackenzie
Photograph taken at Hodsock Priory Snowdrop Walk on 17 February 2019
Traffic
cars, vans and people
hooting, tooting, scooting past
won’t get there faster
©️ Liz Mackenzie
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