I don’t think I have ever attended a beach party, but when I lived in Cologne all those years ago, I often spent summer days with friends at a Baggerloch, a man-made lake, swimming and sunbathing until it got chilly, then we’d light a fire to cook food, play guitar, sing, and drink Kölsch and […]
Category: Haibun
Swan skims the water
Swan skims the water dips its beak into molten orange sun-spill, breaks the meniscus that keeps the dark depths in before lifting its wings upwards into pink and violet layers of sky a single white feather rocks on ripples Kim M. Russell 12th July 2019 My response to Carpe Diem #1701 sundown (or sunset) one-bun […]
Lest We Forget
I’m not one for parades or any kind of gathering where there are crowds of people – they panic me, and I feel unsafe. I prefer to keep the memory of the people who died at war with a poppy on 11th November, known as Remembrance Sunday. There are many kinds of poppy these days, […]
Picnic Under the Stairs
When I was nine or ten, we moved from a two-bedroom ground floor maisonette to a three-bedroom top floor maisonette on the same estate. I got the box room: it had a huge box that was the top of the stairs, which took up almost a quarter of the floor space, leaving room for a […]
Patterns of Ice and Water
We are frozen, Ice Age wasteland distilled in our bones and cart-wheeling in the blizzard of the imagination. We move together with clouds, snow and water, in a geometric dance, tessellated into landscapes of free-art fractal frost. We are wind patterns on snow, hoar frost flowers and lonely glaciers until, one morning, the skeins of […]
First Spring in Norfolk
My daughter and I moved to Norfolk in March 1992. We’d only had a few holidays here and were moving from the hustle and bustle of London to a small village on the North Norfolk coast with no street lights, a bus to Norwich twice a day – and we knew nobody. We threw ourselves […]
A Fool for April
In these days of fake news, I wonder whether pranks will be played in The White House. There have been some interesting April Fools’ jokes in the newspapers and on television throughout modern history. In 2017, the Irish Times reported that Dublin was getting its very own ‘Trump Tower’, when it revealed that ‘Trump Dublin’ […]
The Solitude of Green
It is never lonely in our garden; there is no despair or desolation, just the solitude of green. Even in winter, I am embraced by green: the bending of the grass to my feet; the fresh shoots of snowdrop and daffodil braving the frost and ice; the murmuring of branch and leaf although, at this […]
Lonely Magpie
On a never-ending January day, the whole garden drips with silent grief. There are a few sparse, dried-up leaves clinging desperately to the willow, now pollarded and looking sorry for itself. No birds alight on its branches, not even the magpie, which has taken to haunting the silver birch right at the end near the […]
In the Cathedral
I am not a member of an organised religion but I believe I am a spiritual person. Although I don’t attend church, I like to visit them, whether they are small local churches or cathedrals. I love the quiet, the smell of burning candles and incense, and stained glass windows. Many large cathedrals have crypts, […]
writing in north norfolk 