After dark months of hard-as-iron winter, cold and long, the first month of spring has been bereft of birdsong. Still, the vernal magic wand is quietly greening, scattered with white stars of snowdrops, yellow daffodils and golden coronas of celandine, conjuring constellations of sunshine. Kim M. Russell, 23rd March 2020 My response to dVerse Poets […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
Duck – a poem in Visual Verse
The image Visual Verse selected for the March 2020 issue, Vol. 7, Chapter 5, was an unusual one. At first I didn’t know what to make of the photograph by Ryan McGuire, but I managed to write something in the given hour and word limit before going off-line to visit my daughter and grandson. Once […]
Sea Howl
While walking with my dog along the beach, I found a seashell different from the rest, a torrent of waves filled with Neptune’s speech. Spellbound, I contemplated every word enunciated on the ocean’s breath – a poem or the cry of a seabird? Savouring it like salt upon my tongue, the foam like fishy kisses […]
Surprised by Love
Unlike most of her friends and acquaintances, her teenage years and early twenties were not so much sweet with romance but bitter with break-ups and dour with disappointment. “I don’t know why I was surprised every time love started or ended,” she told her therapist, “I never chose the unlikely men I ended up with, […]
The One Who Does Not Go Straight Home
I am the hare who does not go straight home. I relish the cool dew on my whiskers, the wind in ears and scut. Dawn steals past the farmer’s gate and I follow in its honeyed wake, zig-zagging fields, up and down hills, among the yellow daffodils, too full of giddiness to go straight home […]
Apple-ogia
They are our atonement for the half-eaten cores tossed from dusty, finger- smeared train windows, sprouted into hoards of apples, sparkling orbs, railway siding orchards. They’re a feast for birds, burnished rosy and russet, worm-holed and sweetly rotting to the fading drone of wasps drunk on the sadness of sugar. In spring, wind-fresh blossoms flutter […]
On first hearing The Planets by Gustav Holst
Of all the music created by Gustav Holst, Mars, the Bringer of War was the most terrifying to my young ears. The first time I heard it was in a music lesson at school, in which we had to work out the planet for each of the seven pieces, and I sensed darkness, drama and […]
Returning
In thick dark clusters, swallows skim the lake, reflections on the water shimmer clear. It seems as if the day will never break; in thick dark clusters, swallows skim the lake. I am returning too, to past mistakes I left behind with sadness, guilt and fear. In thick dark clusters swallows skim the lake; reflections […]
Delicious on my Tongue
you cooked me a meal so delicious I barely stopped between mouthfuls the richness of its flavour imprinted on my tongue oblivious to the knowledge that it wouldn’t last for long I wiped my lips on a napkin wishing for another taste ignoring the red wine in my glass in case the piquancy went to […]
Apple Magic
Apple peel, apple peel, tell me true, who am I going to get married to? I waited too long before I threw the browned skin over my shoulder, and it wasn’t until we were much older that I knew my true love was you. Kim M. Russell, 24th February 2020 My response to dVerse Poets […]
writing in north norfolk 