This month in Visual Verse: An Anthology of Art and Words, we have an unusual image by an unknown artist from the Wellcome Collection, which has inspired a wealth of strange tales and poetry. I look forward, on the first of every month, to the Visual Verse challenge of one image, one hour, 50-500 words. […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
Tread Gently
Tread gently in this skyscape,where a single cloud can weighheavy on the soul. Some escape;cumulonimbi the shade of sludgebluster grumpily across the skyuntil the sun sets, and blackbirds trill in hedges. An owl hoots a reply,to a distant barking dog.It is then that I see dead people, looming like vaporous fog,and left-over dust and gasestransform […]
May Flowers
The cherry tree has been stripped of blossom, but the first of the honeysuckle is blooming in our garden, in time for this week’s flower moon. Its scent floats on the breeze, having survived the wind and downpours to which this May has subjected us. This morning, the sun is shining on a cascade of […]
The Leporine Waltz
Although hares may be mad throughout March, in the sun and the heat they continue to spar. As they waltz, the fur flies from their swift fisticuffs, unable to resist a last box round the ears. Ring the Hill, Old Fat Bum, Stag of the Stubble, all are mad hares and ready for trouble. Kim […]
Ode to Dylan Thomas
You did not go gentle through your life, knocked hard for flesh to let you enter, soul-shaken by your mother and your wife, thistledown-free and unafraid of winter. You, self-confessed gusty man and a half, languished in whisky and bitter-sweet ale, like the Dewi singing, ready with a laugh and a rhyme like a spouting […]
Thorns of Love
Those thorns of love wound so tightly around your heart have penetrated deep into its chambers, and sharpness abounds. Muscle and flesh are separated into bloody serrated wounds, which have left their marks, invisible to all but you, the one who bears the scars. Kim M. Russell, 17th May 2021 Image by Sarah Wolfe on […]
Indigo
They called her Indigo, not the name of a goddess, but Greek all the same, meaning Indian dye. She’s the turning of twilight, the tint of an iris that blooms in the garden or the depth of an eye. Her name gives her freedom to stride where she pleases in new jeans the blue of […]
Singing in Space
Earth has been dead for a century, and all humans with it. Or so we believe. All that is left of the final expedition is our colony of souls on Mars. Only mouths are we. Who sings the distant heart which safely exists in the centre of all things? That is the question we ask […]
Untying
1. we lived on earth as humble bards all scribbled lines and wine glass shards bitter taste, tattoos and scars of long-lost poems we used to write the ones that kept us up all night and never seemed to turn out right 2. we fumbled and began untying knots of words, and gave up trying […]
The Wherryman’s Return
Once I was lost in Norfolk mist that dims the view of wherrymen, grips you like a watery fist and pulls you further to the fen. I left her at the cottage door, waving with her handkerchief; it was the very last time she saw me, my darling widowed wife. But I still wander past […]
