The first Visual Verse image of the year by Michael Easterling was beautiful but tricky. My poem in January’s Visual Verse is on page 33. As always, I recommend reading all the poems in the issue but, if you want to go straight to mine, it’s called ‘The Fencing in of Rainbows‘. You can also […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
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 […]
Giant
I’m trapped between mature queen beeches, beneath the litter of their crunchy mast. Their silver trunks are adorned with stag-horn lichen and bracket fungus, a tiny fairyland. Me, I’m a giant, one of a circle of stones haunting the landscape, a left-over from a long time ago. Sometimes the great bones of my life feel […]
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 […]
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 […]
I Am a Swan
For years I feltlike a brown duckdabbling and upendingin poetic shallow water, tugging at words and lineslike duckweed and worms,pulling them into forms. One day, I felt the spanof my wings growand began to soarwith sonnets. Kim M. Russell, 11th January 2021 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille: Dabbling in Poetry De is our […]
Dance of Joy
Beethoven shoutedhis incomprehensible joy,a wind that daredthe whole worldto dance helter-skelter,glitter on the river,to dance as melody,irresistible harmony,a symphonyto nature’s inhuman splendour:the gust,the tide,the breaking vinein the figure of a dance. Kim M. Russell. 7th January 2021 My response to Poets and Storytellers United Weekly Scribblings #51: Looking Back and Writing Forward, also linked to […]
In conversation with the aged librarian
Sonnets echo through the shelves of the library, disturbing ancient dust and ghosts of poets lost, to keep you company, stir your memory, protect your heart and soul from time’s frost. Among your books, you are never alone, with full moon or candle to shed light. Besides, heart-learnt words in blood and bone blossom into […]
Rejuvenation
2015 was to be my first full New Year as a free woman. I had left teaching the previous summer, although still working as an examiner, and embarked on a writing course with Penguin Random House, on which I hoped to complete my children’s novel, Joe and Nelly. But I had an itch that I […]
Year’s End
The initial blast of snow that would only last an hour or so – was it a figment of the fearful mind or a tentative reminder of the rapid passing of Time? I imagine the Old Man sifting moments at his desk; the book of life opens itself and he sets about drafting the rest […]
