This March we have Volume 8 Chapter 5 of Visual Verse, with an image by Stefan Keller. My poem is on page 24. As always, I recommend reading all the poems in the issue but, if you want to go straight to mine, it’s called ‘Tales of Lake and Sky‘. You can also read my past […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
The Art of Being Human
This being human is a circus trick.Day after day you perfect your act:a t i g h t r o p e w a l kbetween now and then,a flourish,and then back again,one foot in front of the other.It’s juggling swords,eating fiery words,putting your head in a lion’s mouthand inhaling its meaty breath.It’s the highsand […]
Star Watcher
After watching the stars all night, she was still out there, in the frozen outdoors, tracking a comet across the sky. It was slow-moving, not as bright as she expected, and then it changed course, heading towards her. The light stopped in mid-air, pulsing a shade of blue she’d never seen before. She thought, “I […]
Caught in the Headlights
In the sizzling silent dead of night, pain grips with talons, like an owl in the headlights with eyes of blood red. Snowy wings soar high towards the glimmer of dawn with an aching sigh. Pain rotates like an owl’s head caught in the headlights, talons and beak glisten red, cutting like scissors. I lie […]
To the young poet of the future
Dear poet, I picture you gazing at a star, concerned that you are still so far from being the poet you wish to become. From my position of restrospection I promise that your journey is the best lesson: you will be buffeted by storms and squalls, fluctuations in the weather of the soul, soothed by […]
Aerial
we are aerial we are swifts asleep on the wing or rising sooty-brown to black against the sky wings like scythesand all summer long we fly until the long days pass African heat and grass call like drums and rattles and we fly Kim M. Russell, 8th March 2021 My response to dVerse Poets Pub […]
Fringe
I used to hide behind fringes: the tablecloth fringe that dangledfrom grandmother’s dining table,the one I pulled until scaldingtea splashed on my legs; the grass and weeds on the fringeof the field near the railway bridge,the green-shadowed placewhere I buried my pet hamster; the fringe of hair over my eyes,my mother’s scissor-straight line,the blonde fringe […]
Terrapins and Sweet Corn
I met Caroline in our first year at an all-girls grammar school, and we spent as much time as we could together. She lived a bus ride away in a bungalow, the first one I’d ever come across, which her parents had expanded upwards into the roof, where Caroline had her bedroom. It was a […]
No Swan Song
In my hollow bones, I feel this year will not be the final swan song. Though the waves come higher, and broken reeds are flung across uneven paths, our eyes are dazzled by birded fields and sun-flecked tides that yield the departure of winter. A verdant fern unfurls unseen beside a bubbling stream and something […]
The Oblivion of Snow
‘For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’ Wallace Stevens It started with a silent flake, a branched crystal, not unlike a flower or a tree, or the paper doily cut-outs grandma used to make. It started with a snowflake, but […]
