Nature’s Game

She lurks in the shadows, her grey-brown trunk short, furrowed and corky, long branches pointy winter wands, charming icicles, writing spells with frost and disappearing into mist. She has already drawn the path of winter’s exile in her elder scrolls, plotted the return of spring with a joyful blossom blast: choirs of birds and drone […]

Chilled to their Inner Rings

They wait for spring, those intimate winter trees at the end of the garden: unadorned birches tall, bare and skeletal white trunks shining, patient old friends chilled through with icy winds and frost each morning. Kim M. Russell, 9th February 2019 My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Just One Word: Sensation, also linked […]

Outstaying our Welcome

“You are a guest of nature” (Hundertwasser) boots crush vernal grass and clover barley heads droop the once living quilt of meadow has shrivelled up and died and the earth shivers with fear as the sun climbs ever higher above the blasted pasture of the biosphere while humans bandy words like ‘zero tolerance’ they neglect […]

Like Marilyn

In those old photographs, I see a teenager, pale and lacking confidence, happy to allow mother or sister-in-law to take over for a while, united in womanhood, your blonde hair curled around your face, like Marilyn’s. I arrived too soon. The sparkle of the glamorous life you hoped for faded into monochrome. You grew up […]

Unfettered

Snowdrops bring (de) light to the darkest, coldest months of winter: one day, tentatively poking green heads through hard soil; the next, trickling into a snowdrift of white flowers, gentle harbingers of unfettered reproduction and the joyous riot of spring. Kim M. Russell, 29th January 2019 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Poetics: Harbinger, also […]