Four years ago I realised that teaching was sucking the life out of me. No time for reading or writing, exhausted and ill, I was a caged bird with clipped wings. These days I can spread my wings whenever I want to. nest of speckled eggs sun-warmed clutch in budding tree dreaming of the sky […]
Month: April 2018
Red Shoes
Heels tapped on the pavement, cracked red patent flashed ’Stop!’ but she could only go despite the pinch on her little toe and the blisters rubbed raw by red shoe leather, lucky pumps borrowed from her sister. No shoes of her own, no trainers, boots or sandals to her name; everything sold to fund her […]
Yearning for Mist
Now that lambing storms are done, showers alternate with sun, teasing early honeysuckle to stretch tendrils studded with gem-like buds in pear drop pinks and yellows. Pert and youthful, they raise a smile but I yearn for the mellow shades of autumn, the russet, the ochre, and the artistry of soft, dissolving, misty mornings, and […]
Happiness
It’s joy to wander on a North Norfolk beach with wind streaming in my hair and rustling the marram grass, and the primeval sounds and smells of the sea. I love to watch lazy seals in the sun, seagulls whirling overhead; to feel sand oozing between my toes, the round hardness of pebbles in my […]
The Origins of a Poem
inky streak of cloud in peripheral vision raindrop of a thought Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to Poets United Midweek Motif: Beginnings Susan has given us a whole range of images, saying and poems to help us ponder the question of ‘how to begin’, which she says has generated books upon books in every […]
A Victorian Rose
I have an old, brown carved box, daily polished but never locked; the lid is broken and tied with a string but I treasure it above everything. In it I keep little squares of paper, mapped with grey mildew spatter, with hair inside, and a little picture with a saying from the holy scripture, which […]
Writing in Tongues
I trill in notes of birdsong I laugh in springs and streams I bark with dogs and muntjacs join owl and fox with screams sometimes I breathe in purrs sometimes I growl with rage when my pen clots with feral blood as it wrestles on the page but when it flows, it’s a crashing wave […]
Morning Breeze
blossom surfs the breeze sun shifts shadows in branches silent butterfly Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to Carpe Diem’s Crossroads #4 morning breeze In this new episode of the special feature ‘crossroads’, in which the challenge is to fuse two haiku into one, we have one haiku by a classical haiku poet and one […]
Mountains
I have never stood at the foot of a mountain and looked up at it, not even when I lived in Ireland. The nearest I got to one was the Hill of Tara, from where I could see pretty much the whole of County Meath. But I have looked down from an aeroplane and marvelled […]
Widdershins around the willow…
past a clump of daffodils, wild and self-willed, tangled in the tall grass where the bindweed grows. In corkscrew branches, a sunlit wood pigeon mutters a throaty warning for pilgrims to this place of Salix magic where Nature is budding green curtains of respectability to replace her tattered rags of dignity. Kim M. Russell, 3rd […]
writing in north norfolk 