As my early summer sun sizzles into evening,
on the other side of a mountain
of poetry, winter chill has frozen
your fingers to your pen
or your keyboard,
poems petrify in your head
and there’s no escape.
My season has begun to flow
while yours has ebbed and, although
the beach is empty of waves, it is cold
and damp. Salty air has corroded your anchor
and you are stranded, an ancient whale
with too many songs and no voice to sing.
Only faded rainbows spout from your blowhole.
Kim M. Russell, 30th December 2019
My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads PLAY IT AGAIN! with REAL TOADS
Today is a sad day; it is Kerry’s final prompt as a founder member and Creative Manager of The Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. After nearly a decade of being part of our amazing community of poets, writers, photographers and artists, she is saying goodbye with a retrospective, and invites us to PLAY IT AGAIN! and AGAIN! and AGAIN! We have a great choice of prompts. I decided to go back to July 2015 with Kerry’s prompt ‘Let’s find our poetic voice’.
writing in north norfolk 
Your poetic voice is so strong, Kim! A writer can only develop as true a voice over time, and with a lot of consciousness about what his/her purpose is in writing. I have always admired this in your work, and love how it comes out in this poem. The metaphors which draw upon your appreciation of nature and cycles, so neatly tied to emotion are poignant and heartfelt.
Thank you for everything, dear fellow toad. This journey is not yet over.. though new paths have appeared.
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Thank you, Kerry, for appreciating my writing and for inviting me to join you in the Imaginary Garden. I’m proud to be a Toad!
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This is gorgeously encapsulated, Kim! ❤️ I have loved your poetry and learned so much over the years! This is especially strong and poignant; ” an ancient whale with too many songs and no voice to sing.”
#realtoadsforever
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Thank you, Sanaa!
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Oh Kim, this moment and your poem have me very blue. May we never find our words frozen in our brains with no way to express them. Deep sigh.
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Thank you, Marian,. I made myself sad with this one.
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Sadly, ALL rainbows MUST fade…
Well captured, Kim.
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Thank you, Ron.
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Kim- I love ‘poems petrify in your head’. Stunning line!
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Thank you, Linda!
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The last line nearly broke my heart. There is so much pain in that sort of loss, in seeing beauty and life being stripped of all the goodness… and turned into the shadows of shattered bones.
May the rainbow reclaim all their bright.
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Thank you, Magaly.
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“An ancient whale with too many songs and no voice to sing.” Oh my goodness, those lines struck me………no more pond to sing in, but we will keep singing.,…………what a wonderful poem this is.
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Thank you, Sherry. The move from Toad singing in the pod to whale spouting rainbows on a beach is a sad but inevitable one,
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This is beautiful, sad, yet I feel it call out to those who feel the hunger to write poetry, to write while the words are there, to leave them as flowers so others can be urged to write their own garden.
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Thank you, Susie.
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I do love the way you express this as the voice from the young to the old… too often both young and old only talk to the young, and the ancient ones also need the encouragement… even if it’s only a rainbow seeping from our blowholes.
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Thank you, Bjorn. Have you read Rilke’s letters to a young poet? There are other such writings from the old to the young, but not many from the young to the old.
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I have not read them, but I have heard about them
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Beautiful, Kim, wild, difficult and a little strange in your account — I’ve not seen poems of yours go here much before — And as an older poet, giving voice to the younger one is both a gifting and al question: Do poems ossify in our voice? Are those songs lost or reinvigorated in a new generation of poets? The old beached whale here suggests something lost forever or going extinct. It’s been such a wonder reading your work at Real Toads and I hope you will visit earthweal.com after it launches this week and share more.
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Thank you so much for reading and commenting. I will certainly visit and bookmark earthweal.com. Happy New Year!
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It’s hard not to feel weepy, here at the end of the Garden. I know that echoes of those songs will still linger on the ‘net and there will be new songs sung some other places, but I will miss the Toads.
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It’s a sad day, Rommy, but as long as we have poems to share, the Toads will be together.
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“..poems petrify in your head/and there’s no escape.’ This really hit me where I live, as the old expression goes, as I have been living it for too long…but there seems to be an ability to thaw out and dig deeper in all of us, regardless of age, and I hope we can avoid the terrible fate of silence you depict so vividly here. Hopefully our small band will never completely dissolve, though the tides may carry us to parts unknown. Thanks for the years of reading and support, Kim.
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Thank you for reading and commenting, I’ll be looking out for you on the poetry trail, and a Happy New Year!
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A lovely tribute to the Imaginary Garden and a lovely way to end it all …….
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Thank you so much,, Helen. It may be the end of the Imaginary Garden, but the Toads live on! Happy New Year!
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A poem both accomplished and moving – the sadness of ending and also the optimism of future directions: not so much a passing of the torch as a claiming of it by its new bearer. Yet I like to think the old torch will continue to give light, so that many new ones may be lit from it.
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Thank you, Rosemary. I believe the Toads will continue to sing long after the Imaginary Garden gate has closed. Happy New Year!
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Nice work☺️
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Thank you, Robert!
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