Four years ago I realised that teaching was sucking the life out of me. No time for reading or writing, exhausted and ill, I was a caged bird with clipped wings. These days I can spread my wings whenever I want to. nest of speckled eggs sun-warmed clutch in budding tree dreaming of the sky […]
Category: Haibun
Happiness
It’s joy to wander on a North Norfolk beach with wind streaming in my hair and rustling the marram grass, and the primeval sounds and smells of the sea. I love to watch lazy seals in the sun, seagulls whirling overhead; to feel sand oozing between my toes, the round hardness of pebbles in my […]
Mountains
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 […]
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 […]
writing in north norfolk 