It has taken over four years to regain faith in myself. Just before I retired from high school teaching, I was sick, exhausted, and unsure if I was doing the right thing. The plan was to finish a novel I started years ago before the pressures of teaching took over, so I enrolled on several […]
Category: Haibun
Easter
I remember, as a child, going to Sunday school and receiving a cross made from a palm leaf on Palm Sunday. On Easter Sunday, I would go to church with my grandmother, where I would receive an Easter message in the shape of a cross, usually with a picture of a lamb or spring flowers, […]
Poetry in the Music
I came to poetry through music. My mother was very musical and loved to sing. She had a broad taste and, instead of lullabies, she would perform popular songs of the day to get me to sleep, songs by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra; Harry Belafonte’s ‘Scarlet Ribbons’ (which reminds me of mum) and […]
Kamishibai
Last Saturday I left home a mother and made a journey of just over four hours to visit my daughter and look after her home while she was in hospital. The train journey was chilly and the landscape covered by a blanket of snow, with the constant worry that at some point the train might […]
Shades of Grey
Grey is how I saw the world in my early childhood: in monochrome newspapers, television and old photographs. It seemed as if two world wars had leached all colour. And then it returned in the sixties. My nan had a drawer in her bedroom dressing table which was full to the brim with black and […]
Ravensbury Memories
When I was a child, I lived in a town in Surrey called Mitcham, which is now part of South London. I remember it as a safe place. I knew pretty much everyone in the road where I first lived with my grandparents and later, when my parents moved to a small estate consisting of […]
Italics
When we were children, my husband and I lived in different blocks on the same housing estate and attended the same infant and junior school, where we sat in separate desks in a classroom where we were taught by a teacher neither of us will ever forget. She was grey-haired and stern, wore a twin-set […]
Another Island – Sinbad’s Voyage Part 5
stranded by the tide a strange garden of delights honest work’s reward Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to Carpe Diem #1351 Theme Week ep. 5: The Fifth Voyage of Sinbad In the final episode of our CDHK Theme Week about the Voyages of Sinbad, we have got to his fifth voyage.
Winter Moon
When we lived only yards from a beach, we took many late night walks with our Jack Russell cross terrier in all kinds of weather. The wind on the North Norfolk coast is a force to reckon with, together with the mounds of sand that drag your feet. Jasper, our dog, loved the flatness of […]
Remembrance
I haven’t been out in the garden much since early autumn and recently I was too ill to even think about it. On Tuesday I gazed out at the last flakes of rusting leaves and a leaden sky. I watched Luna, our black and white cat, meld into the shadows; marvelled at the gold and […]
writing in north norfolk 