Category: Poems Inspired by Artists, Music and Other Writers

Lithophile

Dawdling spring starts to lift winter’s dreich and brumy veil from saturated inky hills, revealing cobalt palimpsests on elephantine grey. Outcrops of land-slid indigo form walls dividing pitch and roll, cross ragged seams of paths and tracks through brown and ochre soil riddled with lumps of flint and shale. In the distance, a sliver of […]

Praying One-Bun

On First Seeing ‘Praying Hands’ by Dürer… those honest hands captured in ink, I began to understand spirituality captured in ink, fingers gently pressed in prayer – oh, to draw such hands! Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to Carpe Diem #1411 Praying (one-bun) Today we have a short episode: our task is to create a […]

Winter Crow

wind battered crows ascend from a naked tree leafy silhouettes Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to Carpe Diem’s Crossroads #6 A Leafless Tree (Soseki Natsume) We have a new episode of the special feature ‘’crossroads’, a challenge to create a ‘fusion haiku’ from two given haiku. This week both haiku were written by Soseki […]

The Devil’s Among Us

‘But soon the devil’s among us flesh and fell’, taken from ‘The Ballad Of Villon And Fat Madge’ by François Villon Let us arise from our drunken pit and savour every element of spring: the burst of every flowering bud; the first silvery notes of mating birds; the drowsy hum of the first bumblebee – […]

Beginning a Poem with a Line By Heaney

To flood, with vowelling embrace, a page agape at my pen’s impudence, is to leave wounds of words upon its face, carved with the sharp and flat of consonants. Blood is ink dried in thirsty lines and margins, annotated stanzas, editor’s cut and thrust. All the while my stack of notebooks burgeons, shrouded in poetry […]

Sea Front at 7 a.m.

Heavy tide inhales wind and gasps out chilly salty spray, tangles tongues with rain, spattering the windscreen with Neptune’s saliva. Waves wallop the sea wall – no gulls today. In the dry heat of the car, a disembodied voice on the radio mourns the devastation of last night’s storm. The car behind sounds its horn. […]

Poetry in the Music

I came to poetry through music. My mother was very musical and loved to sing. She had a broad taste and, instead of lullabies, she would perform popular songs of the day to get me to sleep, songs by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra; Harry Belafonte’s ‘Scarlet Ribbons’ (which reminds me of mum) and […]