First Kiss

First kiss
First touch
First steps
And all the bees dancing

From one of the poem postcards
Sarah Connor sent me

Night fell fast
Lights glowed in windows
Chimney smoke drifted
Condensation in the kitchen
Scent of homemade lasagne
A walk in stars and sea mist
Lost in conversation
Music and memories
Open fire’s hiss
First kiss

Misty halo around
An October full moon
Only light on the empty street
Sand crunched underfoot
Unfamiliar
Not much
Both grown older
Perhaps a little wiser
Hands clutch
First touch

On a North Sea beach
Rolling stones on flat sand
Climbing windy dunes
Sand in shoes
Laughing at the sky
Tripping in each other’s footsteps
Climbing over groynes
Splashing in the ebbing tide
No longer hermit crabs
First steps

Hard to say goodbye
The weekend’s at an end
So much more to say
Save it for another time
Will there be another time
Possible romancing
Cards and letters follow
Phone calls every day
Heart is on my sleeve
And all the bees dancing

Kim M. Russell, 22^nd January 2026

This Thursday at the dVerse Poets Pub we are meeting the bar with Björn, who is revisiting the glosa.

Björn reminds us that the glosa goes back to the Spanish courts of the 14th century, and that the idea is to use four lines from a famous or well-known poem and expand on it, keeping it in line with the original. As an example, He has shared a poem he wrote for Open Link, which uses four lines from one of my own poems. The four borrowed lines are called the cabreza.

The glosa consists of four stanzas of ten lines where the last line of each stanza is a line from the cabreza. There is no requirement on the meter other than it should not be too different from the borrowed poem. There is only one other requirement and that is that lines 6 and 9 of each stanza rhyme with the borrowed line.

Björn has also given us some tips from his personal experience of writing glosa and suggests updating old glosa. He says that it would be nice to also say a few words about the poets we have chosen to honour with our glosas.

My lines have been taken from one of the poem postcards Sarah Connor sent me over the years. We sent them to each other. I miss her poems and prompts at dVerse.