A triplet of notes, a single wavering flame echoed by another in a gust of melody. Hush of voice unweathered modulates light and promise tethered by emotional tourniquet until the song spreads wings and skips on time changes like glottal stops. The volume dies, almost to a whisper, and a syncopated drum contains the pressure […]
Category: Poems Inspired by Artists, Music and Other Writers
One brief moment
It vanished in a whorl of icy bubbles, a kingfisher, the first one of the spring. It drew a line through early morning mist, it punctuated silence of the pond with splash and sparkle – then it disappeared. I waited by the river every day, my soles imprinted on the dew-soaked grass, to catch a […]
Rubai of Light
The moon is a balloon that fills the night which bursts with stars and constellations bright, reminding late night lovers of the dawn whose fingers shatter dreams with early light. Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar: Variations on the Rubaiyat This week our host for Meeting the Bar […]
Medusa’s Wedding
A hiss of hair uncoils from its lavish cage of silk and lace, interwoven with gold and silver threads. She guards her stare, lowers turquoise lids, her coated lashes brush pale powered skin. Friends and family gather in the registry office hall and she has a sinking feeling, a foreshadow of tragedy. Then he’s standing […]
An Ode to Heath Robinson
Steam-powered with boilers and kettles heated by spirit lamps and candles, with tangled pulleys of knotted string, they survive the incessant tinkering of overall-clad bespectacled men who hope their inventions will work now and then, refreshing stale scones and removing warts, throwing water over neighbourhood cats, complicating the simplest technique – a genius of the […]
April Skyline
I’m pleased that another ekphrastic poem of mine has been published in Volume 5, Chapter 6 of the Visual Verse Anthology. You can find it on page 24 or you can follow the link to April Skyline.
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 – […]
writing in north norfolk 