At the bottom of the garden, just beyond the gate is a perfect, peaceful bench where I can sit and wait in the company of dragonflies, swans and their faithful mates. Soothed by sun-spangled water, hypnotised by boats, I anticipate a flash, a kingfisher flame to skitter low and coruscate, bubble and ripple in the […]
Category: Poems about Norfolk
Norfolk Names
I’ve fallen in love with Norfolk over more than twenty five years, a place of awkward spellings, names alien to my London ears, where Neatishead and Happisburgh, Mundesley and Wymondham are sounds that rasp and purr when pronounced correctly in the strains of Norfolk burr. Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to Imaginary Garden with […]
Spiced with Autumn
This landscape is rimmed with mudflats, salt marshes and shifting sands. Stubbly fields smoulder with an ever-autumnal aura, tinged with incandescent flames of purple knapweed and sky-blue chicory, bitter and peppery, spiced up with the sweet perfume of crushed clover, wild marjoram and broom. Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille […]
Spirit of the Broads
The smell of freedom and warm winds of summer linger in my sails a little longer, tangling ragged leaves in ropes. I feel the chilly current from the deep below, persistent waves ripple and break against my prow, tug my mooring, in a constant urging to break free before I am encased in winter. Kim […]
Impressions of Gressenhall
Red bricks echo with the homeless and poor, from the squeak of wrought-iron gate to the heavy fall of knocker on imposing door. They reverberate with hunger, fuelled by gruel and mouse-meagre morsel trails of bread-and-cheese through the corridors of their history. They are organised and counted by the workhouse clock, punctuated with oakum, elbow […]
At Cley…
a sigh of seeding grasses purple-mists the marshes where sea touches shingle with a salty, osculating tingle. Flagrantly expansive August sky – empty of birds but clouds sail by – breathes sun-warmed rusty seaweed, samphire and yellow agrimony, and then blows harder in an attempt to float a sea-loving, pebble-beached boat. Kim M. Russell, 2017
Wherryman
Evening and wherryman rolls sails to the sound of dry reeds on the banks the constant rustling and whistling grey herons and avocets bobbing on the waves otters anoint their territory to the east of this shimmering Norfolk Broad the sun always sets […]
Sunday Morning Inspiration
I get up early while you’re still asleep; avoiding the cats, I creep down the stairs, try not to wake you with my leaden feet, stumble over work boots and into chairs. The bathroom floor’s cold, and the toilet seat, the sink is laced with toothpaste and stray hairs. The cat litter smells and they […]
Norfolk Sights and Sounds
windmills and flat landscapes coastal curves and seascapes white sails flash on Broads folded fields and sedgy meadows fruit in orchards and in hedgerows wriggling country roads plopping frogs and gurgling shallows trumpeting geese and warbling swallows rumbling tourist boats Norfolk twang and magpie’s cry commingle as the world slips by diminuendo of minor notes […]
River Sounds
The river gleams dully between trees and gate, tossing tethered boats, setting ropes a-jingle as they wait to be released among hissing reeds and creaking willows. A whistling whirr of wings underscores a skein of honking geese unravelling across high clouds, broken by the raucous cry of a black-headed gull, a permanent marker in a […]
writing in north norfolk 