It sounds like home. It’s a morning walk on a Norfolk beach,wind strewing salty seaweedlike hair on a northerly breeze. The flatness hid the traces. It was a sea henge with an upturned oak stumpat the centre of a Bronze Age ring of trunks:fifty-five split and ancient hearts of oak. And hearts were split. Some […]
Category: Poems
A poem to sum up my feelings in this post.
A Cup of Winter Tea
Steaming cup in hand, I shiver outdoorsas the moon freezesin a cloud of mist and sequin starsnot even northern breezescan penetrate the chill from Earth to MarsI know that under the snowplants sprout and bulbs are ready to unfoldand the tea I made half an hour agois stone cold Kim M. Russell, 20th January 2021 […]
Joining the Dots
Like a child with an activity book, I join up the dots, spy with my little eye pictures in earth and sky, from horizon to horizon: the shapes of flocks of birds, clouds and the occasional rainbow – which must be coloured in. We are joined by bone […]
This Tangled Life
At dusk, I watch the moon risefrom a tangle of bare branches. All those daytime emotionsballed up in a flocculent pocketunravel as I squint my eyes. Planets are at my fingertips; I weave them across the sky,create novel constellations,a loose knit of past and present. The future’s still a golden fleeceI have yet to find. […]
This Snow
This mid-January morningall the blemishes are coveredand soil scars have been stitchedby the dusty blackbird’s tracks. Even the washing looks whiter,not frozen stiff, but dancing, blownby the wind that brought the snow. Kim M. Russell, 16th January 2021 A chilly little poem for earthweal open link weekend #53
Hagstone
Earth, wind, fire and water, each of them a divine daughter, waged a war on heaven and earth, so powerful that it gave birth to weather-witches, hags and crones, who traded in claws and bones, feathers, fangs, skulls and shells, to strengthen herbs and magic spells. Each bound to their own element, some witches crooned […]
A Blackened Sky
Clouds billowed thunderous greyabove charcoal stalks of heather. Trees held their breath all wind-filled day,browbeaten by the bullying weather. As if by lightning strike, a leafless oakexploded into jet-black blossoming: a magnanimous murder of crowsbroke from the darkness cawing, burst into the blackened sky,their sooty feathers spread and soaring. Kim M. Russell, 13th January 2021 […]
This is not a carved box
but the heart of a treea remnant of mean accumulation of scentsthe essence of adolescenceand early adulthooda repository for bad and gooddifferent lives and different timesan amalgam of stories and rhymes Kim M. Russell, 12th January 2021 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Poetics: Object Poems Mish is back to host this Tuesday’s Poetics with […]
Poems in the Frost
At the break of a chilly day,when the ghostly winter-greybark of beech trunks glintedin the low sun, I squintedand found, written in the frost,as if they had recently been lost,a scattering of words: poems scratched by birds,the cursive trail of a snail,the imprint of a pattern of ovalfox pads, toes of mole and mouse,just outside […]
On the Fourth Anniversary of Your Death
Like the sky maps sketchedin the bird brains of the geeseflying overhead this morningin their flocks and vees,your gentle face is etchedinto my genealogy.I hear their honk and chatterloud and clear; they fly byas if it doesn’t matterthat a day cannot be erasedby hoar frost. Yes, it’s here again,sparkling like it did four years ago,stiffening […]
writing in north norfolk 