What has been imprisoned under the lawn all winter? Frozen mud, rendered malleable by spring warmth, releases rusty skeletons of ginger bud cases, last spring’s copper fairy lights. Stones and flint jingle underfoot, sigh a heavy scent from crumbly lumps of black earth, exuding worms from clumps, evicting glossy beetles from ivy tangled in the […]
Category: Poems
A poem to sum up my feelings in this post.
Waves
“These waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.” Theo van Gogh’s reaction to Hokusai’s ‘Under the Wave off Kanagawa’ Hokusai’s vivid emotion echoes, a great wave of Prussian blues, each line curling, echoing in its own splash, all born of a daily exorcism to limber up the brush: painting […]
Echoes of Bluebell Woods
Between the trees it’s blue, as if the sky had fallen and been transformed into nodding blooms, all-knowing fairy traps of truth. It’s a soft echo of blue, a Beltane pool to dive into and be swept away by a current of old magic. Kim M. Russell, 2017 Image found on Pinterest My response to […]
Symbiosis
(found in a scientific article) Trespassing algae slip inside, make no attempt to hide their intimate intentions. The salamander eggs are secure from the Ambystoma egg lovers – they only want a cuddle and some warmth. It’s a win-win situation: the algae feast on waste of nitrogen and carbon seeping from the eggs, photosynthesising oxygen, a […]
The Last Narcissus
Drooped under the hedge, a faded socialite after the party’s over, her flouncy yellow dress is stained and torn, flapping round ungainly limbs. Retiring to the darkness of her bed, a splash of sunshine wrapped in onion skin, she waits for next spring. Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Saturday Mix Teresa […]
Sounds from Saturn
Noises from the eerie vacuum inside Saturn’s rings are sucked out, dying silently in the sad, black void. If we listen, we can hear pops and cracks in the near- total emptiness of space tinnitus, of charged particles and atoms, our audio postcards home. Kim M. Russell, 2017 (Picture: EPA) A quadrille for dVerse Poets […]
A Taste for Arsenic
I resist the urge to touch my tongue to the toxic crystals, leaden grey, stir the poison in, although not so long for it to eat the spoon away. Not a year have I been his wedded wife and already his voice has a steely edge like the sharpened blade of the butcher’s knife in […]
Fallen into Bedlam
She woke to the sound of a quarrel, surrounded by whitewashed narrow walls. But they couldn’t whitewash sorrow with a smattering of hollow words. It was all a masquerade, this singing in Bedlam, a one-woman parade, to escape the man who had sprayed her life with his rotten sheen, turned her into something obscene to […]
Silenced by a Particle
I once sat in an exam, looking for the one right answer, reluctant to accept the duality of light. How does light wave? Should I wave back? According to Einstein, light is a continuous field of waves, which makes me feel wanted. But then, it seems, light travels away, leaves as an electromagnetic wave, divides, […]
The Second to Last Bird of Sunset
I look up at a vacant sky; except for one small cloud and the inkling of a crescent moon it’s empty – and then, there they are, swerving, climbing, swooping, flocking into the sunset. Sometimes, as the sun drops into the dark slot of night, the second to last bird’s wings briefly singe, forever cast […]
