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 […]
Category: Poems about Childhood and Youth
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 […]
This Little Piggy
A little girl holds on to a chair, teetering in her mother’s shoes, shiny leather stilettos, her feet squashed down into the toes. Granny smiles, forgets for a moment the bunions on her aching feet, the pain when walking down the street, the raw skin and unbearable heat. After bath time, with pyjamas on, they […]
Que Sera
I wanted to grow up like Doris Day just walking in the rain with Johnny Ray – whatever will be will be. My dad was the great pretender and, for me, there was only you, Mum, singing to Sinatra and Nat ‘King’ Cole, loving me as though there were no tomorrow. Granddad had the mellow […]
A South London Heaven
Across the football pitch on this side of the rails is wild fennel and long grass: a jungle for snails. There’s a wild damson tree, hawthorn and crab apples, where we lie, you and me, below leafy dapples. In summer there’s sunshine, in winter there’s snow; I love spring and autumn, when trees bloom and […]
Anticipation
A project for the summer, you said, shaking the yellow curls on your head and, opening up your sweaty hand, offered me hard seeds with zebra bands. The teacher had given you a little sack and, like Jack’s mother, I was full of doubt, prepared to throw them out. Where would we grow sunflowers in […]
Fading Photographs
I have an ornate cardboard box, quite large, with lid and metal handle, stuffed to overflowing with tangible memories, crackling paper photographs. I treasure most the black and white that echo with my mother’s laugh, when her eyes were wide and bright, her skin was smooth and her hair was soft, when she could lift […]
My Mum’s Smile
Every summer in my earliest years, My mum aired a hand-sewn quilt And placed it on my bed. On sunny Sunday mornings, We would trace a patchwork journey, Each square a story Of the girl my mum used to be Before she belonged to me. Mum met everyone with a smile, A blossoming bud gleaming […]
Magic Words
When I’m safely cuddled up on a grown-up’s lap, I listen to the secret words that they often whisper in case a wicked witch is near, in the dark where she can hear. Words like once upon a time or the chorus of a nursery rhyme carry me off to other lands, to fairy wings […]
Train Spotting
Troops of ivy-throttled trees line the abandoned railway track. Snorting round the bend, an asthmatic locomotive coughs along to the clickety-clack, smoky echoes of a ghost drumming up memories of day trips to the coast: screaming in a tunnel, waiting on a platform, waving at passengers who always waved back. Kim M. Russell, 2016 Image […]
writing in north norfolk 