Angels and Stars

Stone angels form a guard of honour outside a mausoleum door visible from the open gate where the mourners assemble and wait. Whether it’s a simple grave or tomb, when hair, nails and flesh are gone all that’s left is stardust and bone. Kim M. Russell, 1st November 2018 My response to Imaginary Garden with […]

Once

Once upon a North Sea cliff, fragile skeletons chalky white and ghosts of spiralling ammonites exploded by the waterside. Teased by waves and torn by tides, the behemoth spilled its insides: with salty gush and rocky rumble, the towering cliffs began to tumble. Strewn among the shells and pebbles, bleached by sun and washed by […]

Back from the Deep

A word wrestles between twisted lips, eyes are sunken like two wrecked ships and her nose erupts from a festering face. Dragging behind her a fisherman’s net, hauntingly humming the Flower Duet, she staggers along the pitch-black shore. Studded with limpets and barnacles, lashed with seaweed and pinned with corals, she’s draped in a lacy […]

Hollow

in the hollow of a halo of fresh snow on the willow a lone crow echoes oh how cold this frost-bound sound Kim M. Russell, 25th October 2018   My response to Poets United Midweek Motif: Winter Sumana says that, in the place where she lives, winter’s brief entry is most welcome: the nip in […]

Necklace of Lights

An old-fashioned red London bus takes me back to childhood’s sleepy night-ride home from my grandparents house: sitting between Mum and Dad, bare legs on fuzzy seats, folding concertinas of paper tickets, hypnotised by the perfume of exhaust, rumble of engine, and the window’s black and empty gaze. I believed the stars – obscured by […]