When I was little, we lived with my grandparents and later, when my parents had a place of their own, I spent most of the summer holidays with them. If I wasn’t staying over, my nan would collect me in the morning and take me all the way back at the end of the day. […]
Category: Haibun
Labour Day
No wonder they call it labour – it’s hard work! The build-up was difficult enough, what with the move from Germany to Ireland via London, getting to know new people and surroundings, having to travel forty miles and back to the nearest hospital for check-ups, and then falling over a paving stone on my way […]
Hiroshima Shadow
Where a bicycle bell once tinkled, a memorial bell now tolls. When the clouds lifted and radioactive dust had settled, only shadows remained, ghosts burned into concrete, brick and stone, haunting the ash-covered landscape. What happened to the bike and its owner? Only the faded outline remained, and the hope that someone returned and rode […]
Summer Love
Since they were children, they’d ridden their bikes all summer, at first with stabilisers, and their bikes grew with them. This year, hair bleached from the sun and faces full of freckles, they realised their friendship had blossomed. ticking cycle wheels grasshoppers in the long grass strawberry kisses Kim M. Russell, 31st July 2019 My […]
Beach Party Haibun
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 […]
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 […]
writing in north norfolk 