Nourished with the flood from a river
bulbous with rain, the green blood
of spring arrives with a shiver.
Following a winter of constant chill,
all sound wrung from the landscape,
there is a giggle on the air, a spill
of honeyed song from birds,
the buzz of insects as they escape
their overwintering, the flight of words
from a poet warming to the light
of longer days. Caterpillars wriggle free
to bask on sunny leaves, bees alight
from musky bloom to land on flowers,
to bumble from tree to tree
until day fades into dusky hours.
When the last bird’s trill has been sung,
a spring breeze stirs in branches –
the bluebells’ vesper has been rung.
Kim M. Russell, 13th April 2024
Image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
It’s day thirteen, the second Saturday of this year’s National/Global Poetry Writing Month and, over at NapoWriMo, we are playing with rhyme. The challenge is to create a word bank of ten simple words, each with only one or two syllables; five should correspond to each of the five senses; three words should be concrete nouns; and the last two should be verbs. We should then come up with rhymes for each of our ten words, and use our expanded word-banks, with rhymes, as the seeds for our poems. Our poems don’t have to end-rhyme, but we should use as much sound as possible.
My word bank with rhymes: light / flight; giggle / wriggle; honeyed / sunny; chill / spill; musky / dusky; bird /word; river / shiver; landscape / escape; wrung / sung; flood / blood.
writing in north norfolk 
Lovely poem Kim- and a great last line!
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Cheers Kim!
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Oh my goodness, Kim! You created a beautiful poem from what I call, a sudoku of a prompt! I love these lines
“of honeyed song from birds,
the buzz of insects as they escape
their overwintering, the flight of words”
And the ending is beautiful…
“the bluebells’ vesper has been rung.”
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Thank you, Lill!
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Sounds positively idyllic! Makes me happy just to read about it.
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Thank you, Rosemary. I’m glad it made you happy.
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My hat is off! Especially like “there is a giggle on the air, a spill of honeyed song from birds,”
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Thank you so much, Elizabeth.
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I forgot to mention in Disqus that I love how the line break after “spill” performs the spilling over with enjambment! Lots to take in and appreciate in this poem.
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Thank you for your close reading and appreciation, Alana.
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Lovely! All that bird song in this spring is bringing me lots of light and happiness too.
Thank you for sharing!
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Thank you for reading and commenting, Brittany!
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the bluebells’ vesper has been rung.- this i so love Kim.
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Thank you, Mich. We have bluebells in our garden at the moment.
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I like how you arranged the lines, especially “a spill
of honeyed song from birds,”
and “bees alight
from musky bloom to land on flowers”
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Thank you so much, Melissa!
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