The moment boots imprinted soil, the scent of bark and undergrowth embraced us. We brushed past rusty ferns and sodden grass, and acres of trees exhaled into fragments of sky and cloud, a sigh that hugged our lungs and filled them with a woody song. Pinecones on the path, like Hansel and Gretel crumbs, paved […]
Category: Poems
Breaking the Silence of January
After the revelry of Christmas and New Year, the silence of January is solid as a block of ice, occasionally melting into shifting swathes of mist grey as wood pigeons and musty house mice. No gentle coo, whistle or twitter of birds, the day is mute; no body warmth or human words until the fire’s […]
Enigma
We need iron in our blood to carry oxygen from lungs to cells, and yet iron left in damp air will rust and its shiny grey will crust with red. The earth is rich and hard with iron, mined for making steel, its solidity tempered and twisted into buildings, pylons and bridges, and its smoothness […]
Grey
January is the month of grey nuances, banks of cloud rarely broken by sun dances, mornings when light creeps slowly in a shadowy wrangle with the unholy darkness of a moonless, starless night. The light of grey is never bright, but in a corner of the charcoal grey a flash of snowdrops greets the new […]
From the Young Poet to the Old
As my early summer sun sizzles into evening, on the other side of a mountain of poetry, winter chill has frozen your fingers to your pen or your keyboard, poems petrify in your head and there’s no escape. My season has begun to flow while yours has ebbed and, although the beach is empty of […]
On the Brink
In these final fading days, we are still entangled in the tattered threads of the old year, teetering on the brink while clinging to our hopes and fears. We take them with us as we lurch into the future, where we build our nests anew, weaving old threads with new, ready to sing our spring […]
dVerse Christmas Gifts
Merry Christmas, aged librarian, your gift is wrapped in rosemary and thyme to protect your memories from mould and dust and enhance your sparkling metaphor and rhyme. This Christmas gift, Boris, is wrapped in a hanky; we can’t afford wrapping, so please don’t be cranky. We need all our money to rescue the country from […]
New Day Dawning
Eerie moonlight lingers among broken trees and last night’s feathered singers’ dwindling melodies descend into kaleidoscopic dreams, leak into pointillistic skyscapes of fading stars, scattering promises of dew and dawn and the breath of a brand-new day. Kim M. Russell, 17th December 2019 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Poetics: New Year – New World […]
Stones and Lies
It was a long trek down that dusty road, so she sat on the kerb and counted the stones from her worn-down, second-hand shoes, the blisters on her feet and a heartful of blues. Reminded of years of promises and lies by the tears on her face and the grit in her eyes, she never […]
From Raindrop to River to Sea
It starts with a perfect drop of rain falling from a cloud – and the future arrives just as water, rippling the stillness of a pond, releasing mayflies, dragonflies, and herons that flap their wings like broken umbrellas against spring rain. The gorged river glints, powerful and steadfast on its intrepid journey to the coast, […]
