I have never stood at the foot of a mountain and looked up at it, not even when I lived in Ireland. The nearest I got to one was the Hill of Tara, from where I could see pretty much the whole of County Meath. But I have looked down from an aeroplane and marvelled […]
Category: Haibun
Daffodils
are sunshine condensed in a bulb embraced by soil, waiting to burst with yellow vitality… nature’s haiku spring everywhere. Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to Carpe Diem #1402 Daffodils (one-bun) Today our challenge is to create a ‘one-bun’, a form that was invented by Jim Kacian. It is an ultra-short haibun which has just […]
Faith
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 […]
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.
writing in north norfolk 