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 […]
Category: Poems about Childhood and Youth
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 […]
Guitar Sunsets
My passion as a teenager was playing the guitar, contorting fingers into chords and positions, resonating waltz and polka from the sound hole of a Yamaha, plucking delicate arrangements of Bach and Scarlatti. Now my fingers will not stretch across neck and frets, too stiff and sore to press on strings, too clumsy for harmonics […]
Granddad’s Garden
Confined to house and wireworks walls, he was a caged animal picking tiny nuggets of copper from boot soles like thorns from paws. Every week day, at one for dinner and at five for tea, deep in the fabric of his work clothes and his very being, he carried home the metallic tang of blood […]
writing in north norfolk 