Storm on the Horizon

“My love expands for six dark months
while yours retracts
to rally again
as mine melts away for half a year” from ‘Polar Heart’ by Simon Barraclough

Salt marshes fade away
beneath late August skies
tinged with ever more grey
and a violet obsession.

My love expands for six dark months
while yours retracts.

Wielding an axe of thunder,
a storm skids hooves on dust
of a droughted summer
seeded by nettles.

My love expands for six dark months
while yours retracts.

Flowering grassy surges
of dandelions spatter
brightly on the verges,
thirsting for some pitter-patter.

My love expands for six dark months
while yours retracts.

I insist I’m right as rain,
and brave the nor’easter,
fired up by a raven wing
and the promise of a stormy day.

My love expands for six dark months
while yours retracts.

Pondering words, the storm
drain of my mind breaks open
an augury of rainbows,
impossible to follow to the end.

Kim M. Russell, 27th August 2024

Image by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash

This Tuesday we have a guest host at the dVerse Poets Pub, where Andrew’s Poetics is on the theme of stormy weather. He says: “we live not in ‘interesting times’ but in positively dangerous times – Stormy Weather could describe the results of Climate Change, the rise of Authoritarianism and the imperilling of Democracy or the threat of War in a way we once thought dead”, would like us to channel our inner (or outer) activists into poetry.

Andrew explains that although Poetics is about subject and content rather than poetic form, he would like us to begin our poems with four-line quotes from the work of another poet’s poem and one or more lines from this glosser or gloasador, may be used as a refrain. He has chosen poems to inspire us, but we are free to reach for any poem of our choosing.

He gives us examples, including the Etta James song, ’Stormy Weather’, and poems by Ted Hughes, Stephen Vincent Benét, Simon Barraclough, Claudia Rankine, and links to others.

I chose lines from ‘Polar Heart’ by Simon Barraclough and reworked a couple of old poems into a new one.

31 thoughts on “Storm on the Horizon”

  1. A great choice of glosser Kim and you have really evoked the storm in all its aspects – I particularly love “Wielding an axe of thunder,
    a storm skids hooves on dust”

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  7. Reading the storm tarot here presents “an augury of rainbows, / impossible to follow to the end.” Thunder in August was believed by druids of to be an augury of Crom, and paid heed accordingly. Can we do this with any faith in results or ability to change? I do wonder. Nice weave of Barraclough’s cast of the year’s halves in loverly exchange against our stormy future.

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