1. Too many stairs to the top floor, and yet I ran up them, brave and unafraid of falling, but more scared of the piss-scented lift that always stopped between floors. 2. If you bumped into a neighbour, leaping downstairs was easier, even on the way to the grocery store. it was an escape, the […]
Category: Poems about Childhood and Youth
The Landing at the Top of the Stairs
My five year old self sits on the toilet, door open so I can see the top flight of stairs inhabited by shadows from a skylight. There’s a closed door at the end of the twilight; escaping from the keyless lock is sunlight full of dust motes that float. I am torn between a monster […]
Just Like Her
I was five and struggled to understand the relationship; she was cousin to my mother but only a year older than me. Why couldn’t I stay tidy, just like her? Why couldn’t I keep clean, just like her? She had hair ribbons, shiny shoes and a music box with a little ballerina. I wanted one […]
Childhood in Monochrome
Loving grandparents were always there to house me, feed me, teach me, grandmother in charge of my care while my parents struggled daily. Now only a handful of monochrome photographs remain as tattered ghosts of the past, but my love of home, stories, poems and music still cast their light on the present. They are […]
Bunty
She wasn’t my dog, the boxer with a coat the colour of fox fur, leaping and shivering with pleasure. She wasn’t even my aunt’s. Away from home, I was only four, with my aunt and her current suitor on a jaunt to the Essex coast for four days. I was just a pawn, a red […]
Post War Realism
The opening credits roll across a kitchen sink, in black and white, a fifties masterpiece. A nineteen-year-old mother-to-be is pale and oh so young, drying dishes beside her own mother. Her bump isn’t big. But it’s there. The girl inside is anxious to burst into the world. The scene switches to an incubator, a tiny […]
Where It All Began
It seemed so much bigger then, red brick staunch against the weather,grey asphalt where we ran together,played kiss chase (you missed my lips and kissed my ear), made icy slides in winter.Those hungry waits in line outside the small canteen, air laden with indescribable smells, fingers crossed it was my turn to be water monitor […]
Transistor Radio
No crystal clarity of stereoor speaker power(to speak of)but my battery-powered transistor radioaccompanied methroughout dayswhen I was not at schooland undercover at night,where I’d tune into pirates of the airwaves,a patchouli-scented teenagerin a council flatimagining Woodstock or Monterey. Kim M. Russell, 22nd April 2021 Image by Alex Blăjan on Unsplash My response to NaPoWriMo Day […]
Plum Nelly
Late sun splashes in the summer sky,flashes in the tears every time I seeplump ripe plums hanging in our tree,like the juicy ones she used to buyin brown paper bags to share with me.Their purple musk evokes a sighof scents from grandmother’s scullery;laundry in a copper, hot and bubbly,sprigs of mint, roast on Sunday,cloves and […]
Fringe
I used to hide behind fringes: the tablecloth fringe that dangledfrom grandmother’s dining table,the one I pulled until scaldingtea splashed on my legs; the grass and weeds on the fringeof the field near the railway bridge,the green-shadowed placewhere I buried my pet hamster; the fringe of hair over my eyes,my mother’s scissor-straight line,the blonde fringe […]
writing in north norfolk 