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 […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
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 […]
Sugar Daddy Revisited
Daddy,you have eaten all the sugar,left me hungry and bleeding,a blistered foot without a shoe;you know I must killand sculpture youas a marble statue,bastard, you. Thou wast my universe, my cosmic mistress;if I had known thy crazed intentto render me in alabaster, a lifelesslump of death,I should have beggedfor one last breath. His breathless body […]
Logs in the Basket
Logs are frozento the touch,land in the wicker basketwith a thud.Dusty damp coalfills the hodand newspaper crownswait to lightkindling in the grate. As yesterday’s newsgoes up in smoke,flames roar to lifein our inglenook. Kim M. Russell, 14th December 2020 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille: In the Inglenook Linda is back this Monday to […]
Awakened by the Thaw
‘To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night’ (Gilbran) A heart stony with winter’s chill,and starved from arteries frozen still,needs gradual and gentle thawthat penetrates the very core.When temperatures start to climbafter months of deepest wintertime,shaking itself with a timid shiver,the heart becomes a singing river. Kim M. […]
The Kind Ghost
‘I knew we had a ghost,’ the writer said from her armchair piled with cushions, feet warming by the fire. ‘How’s that?’ ‘When we moved in, neighbours told me about a soldier who was killed in the Great War but returned to watch over his daughter, to whom he told stories. She became a writer, […]
Joni’s Colours
I listen to her voice paint a light and rainbow coloured folk song about a child whose eyes were bright but would never see, of crayons, trees and love. The colours flow through a Chelsea morning, with crimson beads and yellow curtains and a taxi, as if she’s singing just for me. A little green […]
They say only the south wind flattens grass
Beneath a sky as clear as an icicle, blasted nests sway in a bitter wind that tugs at the coat of a girl on a bicycle, wrestles her handlebars and steals her hat, gives the bell a cheeky little tinkle, and stings a face already chapped. They say only the south wind flattens grass, but […]
Don’t Fade Away
Yesterday’s pinkstreaks of cloudin the skywere remindersof the driftingin your eyes,the absenceof your spiritthat last visit,the Christmasbefore you died,painful remindersthat I can’t abidethe inevitableebbing tideof your sweet,pink-lipstickedsmile. Kim M. Russell, 30th November 2020 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille: The Dude Abides Lisa is our host and she says that she ‘tried to […]
writing in north norfolk 