The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2026. For March, we are delighted to publish three new works by Nigel Jarrett. These poems are all meditations on the theme of marital disharmony. ‘Deluding the Hens’ is published today, with the next two poems to follow throughout the month.

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Deluding the Hens

 

Warmed first in a pan, simmered

as if to take a real one for boiling,

 

the egg he sleights into my palm,

grinning, is heavy with deceit.

 

He calls it an oeuf, laughing

as I cup it against a break, a crack

 

in the squawking innocence of his dupes,

that brown brood at our feet, plucking

 

each other raw for Christmas, when

he’ll decimate with a knife shoved

 

into the brain through beaks forced

open without a sound – all silence,

 

in fact, as he builds a feathered mound,

its protests pumping skeins of blood.

 

I roll  my hoax into a straw saucer, picking

from its kin two shitty brown eggs

 

cosying up to another white interloper,

its job of beguiling done. ‘They’re too dull

 

to know,’ he tells me, unaware that his wife

is a ghost in the bedroom window, thinking

 

of that Christmas when, the more deceived,

she’d fled, gulled, his china trick seen through.

Nigel Jarrett has published two collections of poetry: Miners at the Quarry Pool and Gwyriad. The first was described by Agenda magazine as ‘a virtuoso performance’ and the latter by Acumen magazine as ‘an engrossing window on to family relationships…but also ranging farther afield with perceptive meditations on many of the key moments in human existence expressed with humour and insight’. He has also published four collections of stories, a novel, and a fictional memoir. Jarrett is a former daily-newspaperman. He is a winner of the Rhys Davies prize and the inaugural Templar Shorts prize, both for short fiction. He lives in Abergavenny.