Summer lingers: a few green leaves the colour of basil and fennel seed in thyme-scented September hedges; a flurry of saffron around the edges of a stilted, shrivelled sunflower; unharvested corn, a dirty ochre, and moon-yellow unmown grass gild autumn. A mural of flavour, a kaleidoscope of colour. Kim M. Russell, 20th September 2022 Tuesday […]
Category: Poems
Aphorisms of Hope Lost and Found
Hope is a bat hunting moths round a light only for both to be swallowed by night; it’s the sweet chime of birdsong, the patter of rain when summer has gone, and we can breathe again; it is the wash of waves and their up and down after static traffic in a busy town; it’s […]
Sturmfrei
Free of storms, to be alone, to do what needs to be done, to wander in the dormiveglia, from dawn to dusk and back again, I am content to swallow phosphenes, each scintilla, until ēniteō! I shine forth with gleaming light. Kim M. Russell, 6th September 2022 Another, shorter poem for this week’s dVerse Poets […]
Feuillemort
These first cool mornings are redolent with fallen apples’ sweet, rotten scent and dry grass littered with foliage. Flowers fade; leaves turn from green to brown with nothing in between, and crops gave up weeks ago. But this is not autumn. Nature’s grabbing what she can, counting the souls of every aliferous foliole before abandoning […]
Season of Choice
‘No blue without yellow and without orange, and if you do blue, then do yellow and orange as well, surely’ – Vincent van Gogh Spring is always fresh and new with gentleness of pastel hues so delicate, tender, newly born on a gentle, breezy, sunny morn. But autumn still retains the blue of summer skies, […]
Tingle
In this stifling heat I conjure up the redolence of forest snow, the ice-trapped secrets of moss and fern, and the tingling overtone of pine – how I long to bottle it, make it mine. Kim M. Russell, 23rd August 2022 For this week’s Tuesday Poetics our guest host is Jo, also known as Worms, […]
Lion Tongue
I trail scorch marks in my wake as I breach each firebreak. My voracious carnassials devour every blade of grass and flower, the leaves on every shrub and tree. Once I charge, there’s no stopping me. But when you feel the biting chill of winter coming over the hill, you embrace my crackle and roar; […]
Ghostly Bedfellows
I’m so pleased that I was long-listed in the Globe Soup June micro fiction competition, which had the theme of ‘cats’ and accepted fiction, non-fiction prose and poetry with a word count of up to 100 words. Ghostly Bedfellows In the grey shadows of predawn, I’m woken by companions of the past and the present, […]
Blue Period
As in Pablo Picasso’s depressive art, the long path through a winter dark with anguish, despair and frailty is a spectrum of indigo melancholy: from blue-tinged ice, cobalt and navy to the hopefulness of aquamarine, it echoes our blind faith in the seasons. And then, suddenly, pieces of sky drop to earth in hosts of […]
Persistence of Vision (a cento)
The future was a beautiful place, once. I held you that June morning when you opened your eyes; we were seeing one another after seasons of darkness. Like some watcher of the skies. I consider how my light is spent, look into my glass and view my wasting skin; vision may be just a part […]