Summer permeates a single layer of cotton: a fluttering dress, a baggy shirt or colourful sarong. Unwrapped from woollen layers, we can breathe, clothed in flags of freedom, rippled by the breeze. On the beach, the sea sparkles and lures us in; we bare our bodies and the sun smiles on our warm skin. Kim […]
Category: Poems
Summer Shades
Sky of robin egg blue splits; zigzags crack across its shell, spill sun, a yellow yolk, a glue uniting buttercup and gorse. Midas rays riffle ponds and pools, spark mayfly nymphs that break the surface like gilded bubbles in their ghostly mating rituals. Sunlight joins the dance, dives into chickweed, surfaces to gleam on slippery […]
Blessing in Disguise
In darkened rooms with curtains pulled to banish day, we welcome gloom, unaware of gaps allowing rays to bathe our eyes – sadness consoles grievers, a blessing in disguise. Kim M. Russell, 2017 Image found on Pinterest My response to dVerse Poets Pub Poetics – Blessings Paul tells us that he has been reading Anam […]
Loomery
Guillemots huddle on a cliff ledge; indifferent in monochrome, they’re packed together to the edge. Experienced and fully fledged like pilots from an aerodrome, guillemots huddle on a cliff ledge. Hidden by coarse and salty sedge that sprouts among the seaside foam, they’re packed together to the edge. The ridge is a place of anchorage, […]
Heavy Plant Crossing
The country road tilts and blends into a sudden blind bend, overhung with bush and tree, so dense that, at first, I do not see a red and white sign erupting from a pile of soil: heavy plant crossing. My imagination runs riot with giant hogweed and triffids evolved from seeds that drifted down from […]
Pepper
She offers him a bright red capsicum, a lonely heart, filled with peppery seeds. She holds her breath, bares delicate, perfumed skin, anticipates a sharp knife’s sting: seeds are spilled, her heart sliced and diced into a hot stew, a […]
Turnstone Insomnia
On the rocky shores of just after midnight and well before wave-break of day, turnstones tip pebbles, clatter in my head, and run across my shipwrecked bed, drenched with shadow-spray. Kim M. Russell, 2017 Image found on rspb.org.uk My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Of Insomnia and Sleep In today’s prompt, Sanaa has […]
Fay Watson and the Empty Chair
You want me to sit on what you think is an empty chair? Not while he sits there, his soft blond hair matted with blood, face grey as the smoke from the gun I pressed to his head. He’s not dead to me, he’s locked in my brain, a bloody stain I can’t scrub clean. […]
I got back from Wales…
and I have another poem in the latest Visual Verse. Here’s a link to the June issue, Vol. 4, Chapter 8 of the online Visual Verse anthology. You can find my poem on page 38 or you can link directly to the poem, entitled ‘Demented’.
House Martins
below the roof edge on a jutting ledge snowy flash of feathered legs returning to eggs busy between hawthorn hedge and the young they fledge dizzy Kim M. Russell, 2017 House Martins by Mark Kilner from the Springwatch Flickr group, found on bbc.co.uk. My response to dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar – Lai it […]
