Category: Poems Inspired by Artists, Music and Other Writers

Monochrome

Beneath the frost of November moon they murmur musky mist around the bone of tree-like antlers, a message of timeless continuity, melodic but wordless like the music of rain and flowing streams, or stars and comets rejoicing in their beams. Russet and lemon-yellow leaves no longer rustle but drift and rot, muting Earth the singer […]

Beauty Beyond the Grave

The shadow of laudanum no longer stained her skin, in life and death her beauty spilled luminous, and green-blue eyes belied disease that once coiled within. Her glorious red hair had grown beyond eternal sleep, entangled in it, Rossetti’s book of poetry, penetrated by a single worm where damp and mould had seeped. Seven long […]

Flipped

It was a raging sea-magic kind of day, with thunder clouds and wind-whipped waves that made us mermaids forget salty witches. Oblivious to consequence, caught up in the rumpus, we anticipated handsome seamen snatched by squalls from a schooner’s deck, combed out the tangles in our waist-length hair and spread our glistening fish-tails on a […]

A Question of Tears

‘From where does the thundercloud come with its black sacks of tears?’- Neruda Black sacks of tears arrived on my doorstep today; I thought they’d been delivered by the coalman, until I opened them, and some teardrops got away, attaching themselves to leaves and gutters, dripping on my shoulder, soaking my jacket like a sobbing […]

Shades of the Seashore

We walk along the blustery beach, embraced by towering arms of rock laced with white foam cuffs. Falling sheer to shore, sombre cliffs, banded with distorted strata of basalt, rusty iron, brown and buff, are broken by moss-cloaked boulders, moist with silver sea mist and rain, and crowned with gnarled oak, wind-blasted, salt-stunted limbs leaning […]

Legs Dancing

I’ve been off-line for a while, so I was pleased to see I have another poem in Visual Verse.  In October’s issue, the image is by Valérie Mannaerts/M Museum Leuven/Alexandra Colmenares.  You can either click here to see the image, read all of the poems and find mine on page 36, or you can go directly to ‘Legs Dancing‘.

Pop Quadrille

the art of quantum physics energetically pops and fizzes on impudent protruding tongues bright and tripping acid tones orange, blue and green on Andy’s silver screen from the depths of velvet underground to a star man spaced out in outer space on Einstein’s face Kim M. Russell, 10th October 2019 My response to dVerse Poets […]

American Sentence in Purple

French kisses bruise the sky as I cartwheel through clouds of purple. Kim M. Russell, 23rd September 2019 My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Bits of Inspiration: The Colours in a Song Susie is our host today with a prompt that asks us to experiment with synaesthesia, in particular the colour of music. […]