I close my eyes and count to ten slowly – they need time to hide in bush and tree, shed and outside lavatory, behind the bed sheets hanging on the line. Seconds fall and pool a shadow round my feet, the counting is complete: I open my eyes wide to an empty garden and a […]
Category: Poems about Childhood and Youth
A South London Childhood
Balconies and concrete stairs, beery piss in broken lifts, every night the same old prayers, someone get us out of here. Tightrope walking on the fence, leap the gap between the sheds, long walk to the traffic lights, sideswiped by a motorbike. Buttercups and dandelions crowd long grass by rusty gates; in the alley, shadows […]
Family Treasure
In the snapshot, you are smiling, the great uncle I knew for only a few years; yet I keep your photographs, nineteen-thirties monochrome, together with Neptune’s and Davy Jones’ endorsement of your initiation into the solemn mysteries of the deep. Seven years to the day before my mother’s birth, you sat on a boat bound […]
Bluebell Wood
Beech trees are coming into leaf, upper limbs foaming with translucent green leaves, softly crimped; all the spaces in between are dusted with bluebells and wood anemones. Lazuline seeps through branches, pools and floods: memories of childhood’s chimeless campanology and carpets of sky. Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to Poets United Midweek Motif ~ […]
Sitting on the bottom step…
I wondered what lurked in the landing’s shadows. I listened to the creak of breathing wood and the wash of my imagination’s shallows. I whispered to the upstairs ghosts mollifying volleys of hallos and showers of secrets and prayers – just making sure they stayed upstairs. Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to Imaginary Garden […]
Brilliant Explosion – a poem in Visual Verse
A good start to the poetic year with a poem in the January 2018 issue, Vol. 5, Chapter 3 of the online Visual Verse anthology. You can find my poem on page 14 or you can link directly to the poem, entitled ‘Brilliant Explosion’.
Any More Fares?
To a young child, the jagged edge of paper poked out like a tongue from the machine slung round the conductor’s neck. ‘Any more fares, please?’ With a rattle of his handle he conjured a miniature scroll, a ticket printed with conundrums to last the big red bus ride home. Kim M. Russell, 2018 My […]
Grandmother’s Shoes
She had a closet full of shoes she wouldn’t throw away, reminders of the comfy days when every shoe would fit. For me, it was a treasure trove of giant shoes for a four-year-old to slide across the lino, Ginger to my grandfather’s Astaire. I was completely unaware of the agony of her size three […]
Sugar Rush of Imagination
In foolish figments, the wild willowwacks of child- hood, I am myrmidon to my master chocolate. My stash is hidden in entangled tree trunks; knots and holes encircle glints of wrapper and my dark greed, the eccentric need for sugar that makes me jump when Mother discovers crumbs and smears on the bedclothes. Kim M. […]
Midsummer Verges
Content in our garden’s leafy shade, I think back to weedy margins on a distant council estate, full of dandelions and significance, between pan-hot pavement and simmering black tar, a strip of withered grass, litter-strewn and dotted with dog mess, where bike wheels used to spin, click, tick; children clutched coins in sweaty hands at […]
writing in north norfolk 