Oh, the anticipation and the reality of warm-kitchen days when hands touched over a huge bowl or fingers gripped together round a wooden spoon in snowstorms of flour and avalanches of butter eggs and sugar both tied up in aprons red-cheeked and bright-eyed mixing and stirring – baking and burning pies and tarts to tempt […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
Hawk Moth Caterpillar
When I was little, we lived with my grandparents and later, when my parents had a place of their own, I spent most of the summer holidays with them. If I wasn’t staying over, my nan would collect me in the morning and take me all the way back at the end of the day. […]
Repair
The puncture in my heart has been slow to mend. What the bumpy road tore apart is melding slowly, patched and glued together. It will take more than all my years to remount the bicycle of life, pump the pedals faster, blow fears away with breeze through hair and gasp of stuttering breath, to repair […]
Kafka’s Cage
“I am a cage, in search of a bird” – from The Blue Octavo Notebooks Emptiness echoes off my pretty bars, as polished and shiny as they are and, every day when you pass by, you will hear me heave a sigh. I am a cage trapped here below, gazing into an expanse of blue, […]
Mammoth
Crumbling into the sea, we grasp our inheritance. The one remaining link lies deep beneath the waves: Doggerland, a path that mammoths dared to tread before extinction. Thousands of years dead, bones are their only testament: phosphorus to fertilise our green and pleasant land. Kim M. Russell, 23rd September 2019 My response to dVerse Poets […]
The Long Night
They kept vigil throughout the night, watching every movement, every breath, every flicker of dwindling candlelight, shadowy fingers of encroaching death, until the welcome morning light gently caressed the child’s fretting face and soothed away the livid, bright red of fever. All those missed heartbeats crashed together with relief at the sight of the child’s […]
Waiting for Sleep to Come
Each night I walk observing graves tended and untended, order and disorder. My head- stone is blotched with moss and lichen, my brief story blotted out. I shimmer in the silver moon- light, skim long grass and weeds dusted with dandelion and thistle seeds between lych gate and porch, where closely-mown grass scorched over summer. […]
Memories on the Breeze
More than one hundred and fifty years ago the garden belonged to someone else, a different family. Back then the trees were mere saplings, there was a neat path, fragrant roses, herb garden and vegetable patch. Life was simpler, with fewer gadgets, neighbours and expectations. It was quieter and slower paced. The inhabitants of the […]
A Message from the Crows
She lingers by the lane, in the interregnum of autumn, an exhalation of green, watching glossy crows gather over stubbled fields of faded ochre, sewn delicately with bales and rustling with dragonflies. The end-of-day sun casts a murder of shadows, letters from above, the winged initials of her one true love. Kim M. Russell, 12th […]
Bird Brain
Her brain is a riot of knapweed on which twittering finches feed, keeping her awake at night and drowning out each thought when she rises. She longs to see a chestnut or a walnut tree with broad crown and dangling fruit, or bushes of plump blackberries, but she cannot leave these walls, cannot stretch her […]
writing in north norfolk 