Inequality of Weather

The sky-battle’s1 left a mud-puddle,
metal-steeds2 shower us, and burst
riverbanks cause mind-muddle
as fields and gardens disappear.

On the other side of the world,
earth releases a dust-cough
and plants drained of life-juice
crumble into earth’s crust-fluff.

Meanwhile, we puff and blow
at donkey-clouds that will not go.

Kim M. Russell, 27th October 2024

Image by Frame Harirak on Unsplash

It’s Thursday and we are Meeting the Bar with kennings at the dVerse Poets Pub, where Björn is our genial host.

For those poets who are not familiar with kennings, Björn explains that the word means ‘to know’ and that a kenning is a very brief metaphoric phrase or compound word, which was used extensively in Old Norse and Anglo Saxon poetry “as a means of adding both colour and better metre to the skaldic songs. For instance ‘whale-road’ was used as a kenning for the sea in Beowulf, and ‘wave-stead’ replaced ship in Glymdrápa.”  Kennings are still used in many languages to form new words, for example ‘Fernseher’ for television in German (meaning view from afar), or ‘couchpotato’ for a lazy person watching too much TV.

Today we are creating new kennings and using them in our poetry. I am linking up an old poem I recently recycled for Top Tweet Tuesday on X, which I have reworked even further.

  1. storm ↩︎
  2. cars ↩︎

44 thoughts on “Inequality of Weather”

  4. This is also much better way of writing a call for arms than just ramming information at people. Delightful how the reader must work to fully understand the meaning of what you are stating so that s/he can really take it on board. Excellently done.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

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