Saturday afternoon, two hours until the train leaves, the boardwalk springs under my feet and the river sports diamonds. In the stadium at Cardiff Arms Park, there’s a gathering of voices. It rises, echoes like the sea: the roar of spectators gathered for rugby. Kim M. Russell, 2018 Photographs by David Russell My response […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
Lithophile
Dawdling spring starts to lift winter’s dreich and brumy veil from saturated inky hills, revealing cobalt palimpsests on elephantine grey. Outcrops of land-slid indigo form walls dividing pitch and roll, cross ragged seams of paths and tracks through brown and ochre soil riddled with lumps of flint and shale. In the distance, a sliver of […]
Lingering day…
is painted in pointillist shadows and shades. Light, fading with the last echoes of birdsong, clings to moon and stars. It’s a time when bats and owls swoop, skim and dodge in and out of branches not yet dressed in blossom or leaves, but pregnant with promise. silhouetted moon ascends from roof to ancient ash […]
Voices in a Late Summer Garden
Honeysuckle paints a pale sunset along the garden wall,a tumbling clown, with its tendrils dangling down. Above the constant buzz of pollen-coatedbees, I catch a cockeyed conversation. ‘Get down, you silly girl, you’ll get stuck! I can’t […]
Self-portrait in front of a misty mirror
The glass is cold to touch, fogged up with early morning bathroom steam. A drop of condensation rolls from top to bottom, clearing worm-holes where pupil matches pupil. Nose as close as glass allows before my breath steams up the gap, I see her eye, the cerulean I would drown in as a child, the […]
Beginning a Poem with a Line By Heaney
To flood, with vowelling embrace, a page agape at my pen’s impudence, is to leave wounds of words upon its face, carved with the sharp and flat of consonants. Blood is ink dried in thirsty lines and margins, annotated stanzas, editor’s cut and thrust. All the while my stack of notebooks burgeons, shrouded in poetry […]
This fine city…
fits like a comfortable pair of shoes. I wander meandering alleys of what was once England’s second largest city, flanked by half-timbered shops and houses, from Tombland to the market place. I totter sea-sick among neat rows of sweet-wrapper stalls, up ancient steps to the bookends of castle and cathedral; along the river, where boats […]
Nothing at all
with a fastening of lips drawn and pressed in a tight line at superhuman speed she pulls her finger across the elongated hyphen the simulated silent zip she has none left to argue with no pizzazz, pep or vim she has nothing at all Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to ttps://dversepoets.com/2018/04/09/quadrille-52-zip-it/ De is our […]
Red Shoes
Heels tapped on the pavement, cracked red patent flashed ’Stop!’ but she could only go despite the pinch on her little toe and the blisters rubbed raw by red shoe leather, lucky pumps borrowed from her sister. No shoes of her own, no trainers, boots or sandals to her name; everything sold to fund her […]
Widdershins around the willow…
past a clump of daffodils, wild and self-willed, tangled in the tall grass where the bindweed grows. In corkscrew branches, a sunlit wood pigeon mutters a throaty warning for pilgrims to this place of Salix magic where Nature is budding green curtains of respectability to replace her tattered rags of dignity. Kim M. Russell, 3rd […]
writing in north norfolk 