At the beginning of December your first year was over; you had found your feet, unsteady as yet but eager to make a quick escape. You wanted to chase flakes that fell from the sky, fluttered on your eye lashes and kissed your cheeks, even after a week when snow rose to the roof, icicles […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
A Recipe for Insanity
eviscerate and bone me batter and bake me blind take my sweetness to the hard-crack stage and caramelise my mind splinter me brittle with mortar and pestle quadrille me with sanity fine-edged with a sharpening steel from your batterie de cuisine of the surreal Kim M. Russell, 2016 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Tuesday Poetics […]
Map of Scars
Barbed wire necklaces and stars, tracks of fading scars, isobars connecting moments on the contour map of life: childhood memories of cuts on knees, silvery stretchmarks or the ribbons you made yourself that held in grief when the pain was too much to bear. Kim M. Russell, 2016 Image found on Pinterest My response to […]
Goose Music
Chain-stitching a rosy sunset, geese arrive in a cloud of fieldfares and redwings, a blizzard of snow buntings blown north to south. There’s an explosion of wings, no soaring, no gliding, just metronomic beating and a goose symphony of honks and whistles. The water ripples, in a shower of drops they rise and fade Into […]
Waves like Arabian Stallions
(covering Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’) in a sea of possibilities I’m surrounded by waves like stallions horses coming from all directions noses flaming white manes shining stars in the black mare of night up against a sea wall I seize the first possibility in a crash of waves coming in like Arabian stallions lapping into sea […]
Descent to Wroclaw
I don’t like getting to and from airports, the hanging around, the waiting in queues and the scrutiny of airport officials, but I do enjoy flying. I like switching off and ignoring other passengers, immersing myself in a book with nothing else to distract me – no telephone or door to answer, no appointments to […]
Subjugation
In the spring of 1940, in the season of renewal and birth, twenty two thousand men gasped their last defiant breath as bullets exploded in their heads. Now, frozen in bronze, the Katyn Pieta kneels before the powerful wings and sword of the Angel of Death, cradling one of the fallen dead. There’s a hole […]
Wroclaw by Night
Night populates the city, black ink spilling over pavements, splashing quiet corners, filling squares and parks, water- falling down the riverbank, soaking a couple as they hurry from one island of sodium light to another, across the Love Bridge, an anchor for younger hearts padlocked to railings. On the far bank, night is celebrated with a candle-cake […]
Afternoon in Wroclaw
Autumn sepia-tints gathering clouds copper: at three o’clock the day is already drawing curtains on a red and white chimney rising from the other bank of the Oder, piercing the horizon, its smoke a white wind sock frozen while the weather takes a breath. © Kim M. Russell, 2016 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille […]
The Seafarer’s Garden – Reprise
Merged in a wash of blatant blue, Ocean and sky meet in a kiss, The seafarer surveys the view, Standing alone in private bliss That slopes down to a steep cliff’s edge, Scattered with feverfew and sedge, Where each brash dahlia tempts a bee. But a sailor cannot forget the sea: Like ships’ masts coming […]
writing in north norfolk 