The first time I shed skin, my tongue probed the blade of a new language, tasted unfamiliar vowels and consonants, bled new words and poems. The second time I shed skin, the words were mine but the tune was new, lilting and green. The last time I shed skin, the landscape taught me everything I […]
Category: Poems
A poem to sum up my feelings in this post.
A Frosty Night
On this frosty night, stars blow themselves to smither- eens and fall like feathers. Silvery hisses and splutters of white noise in my ears rush like the ocean on shingle, a symphony of moonlight, on this frosty night. Kim M. Russell, 19th January 2019 My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Weekend Mini-Challenge: Mustn’t […]
Halo of Imagination
How incandescent is graffiti of the mind! On naked brick a celestial trick, a light show of imagination in deepest winter’s meditation. Kim M. Russell, 19th January 2019 My response to Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo Thursday photo prompt: Imagination #writephoto
Sonnet to a Poet’s Hands
The young man’s hands were slender, quick and strong, composing sonnets to his unknown muse, creating worlds in drama and in song to challenge the emotions and amuse. The busy writer’s hands were stained with ink and words. His skin was cracked and raw with rhyme. The scratching of the pen spurred him to think […]
Selma the Cryptic Cryptid
A cryptic cryptid, Selma’s obscured in the icy depths of Lake Seljord through the long, dark Norwegian winters. She surfaces during hot, quiet summers, playing hide and seek in the fjords, searching for love with an elusive mate, another ferocious monster of the lake. Kim M. Russell, 17th January 2019 My response to Imaginary Garden […]
Tightropes and Stilts Revisited
The long and precarious tightrope walk stopped when I left the big top of teaching. Now I walk on creative stilts, sometimes teetering, sometimes tumbling into a safety net of words and rhyme. I don’t worry because I have the time. Kim M. Russell, 17th January 2019 My response to Poets United Midweek Motif ~ […]
A Need to Know Basis
You need to know, I have a fragile muse fashioned from Venetian glass, blown out and close to shattering. Despite that, we climb aboard a gondola and enter the shadow of the Bridge of Sighs, sighing and shivering from the sudden chill. But Venice has its own poetry. The city knows which form to use […]
A Hollow Season
Oh, season of hollow darkness and silence! When the blackbird sings before Christmas, she will cry before Candlemas, is how the saying goes; so I forgive the muted blackbird and thank the thrush for singing sweet promises of spring despite threats of frost and snow. Kim M. Russell, 12th January 2019 My response to Imaginary […]
Words and Feet
We welcomed them eighty years ago from the shadows of the night of broken glass to the streets of Britain and beyond, child refugees, hungry and scared, in need of homes. History should not be allowed to repeat itself; it’s our turn to act, to learn from the past and protect children fleeing conflict and […]
On the back of the bathroom door…
hangs the cosiest cardigan, the one I hug to me in the early morning; that embraces me while brewing the first cup of tea; that warms me as I write a chilly January poem; the one that shields me from the sneaky draught that evades the excluder and, unwarmed by the log burner, wraps itself […]
writing in north norfolk 