It has taken over four years to regain faith in myself. Just before I retired from high school teaching, I was sick, exhausted, and unsure if I was doing the right thing. The plan was to finish a novel I started years ago before the pressures of teaching took over, so I enrolled on several […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
A South London Childhood
Balconies and concrete stairs, beery piss in broken lifts, every night the same old prayers, someone get us out of here. Tightrope walking on the fence, leap the gap between the sheds, long walk to the traffic lights, sideswiped by a motorbike. Buttercups and dandelions crowd long grass by rusty gates; in the alley, shadows […]
A Bunch of Sunshine
You can keep your bouquets of pungent lilies and blushing roses, cultivated beauty intertwined. What I would like is delicate frills, the brilliance of daffodils: a natural bunch of sunshine. Their trumpets trill the breath of spring, their breeze-swept petals fluttering, their yellow flowers are a welcome sign of the end of wintry blasts, warmer […]
Cracked Shell
On the paved path under the glossy bay tree, newly fallen from a nest, the jagged crack of half a freckled sky blue eggshell tears a hole in the day like a spring morning chorus of anxious mother birds, beaks open in raucous warning. Kim M. Russell, 2018 My poem for the dVerse Poets Pub […]
Newborn
The waiting was breath held underwater, the longing was a crushing ocean wave, and the scalpel cut was the sharpness of moonlight at the end of a stormy day. Now his smile carves deep into my ribcage, his fingers worm paths under my skin, and the smell of his head is fresh-baked bread that I […]
Bluebell Wood
Beech trees are coming into leaf, upper limbs foaming with translucent green leaves, softly crimped; all the spaces in between are dusted with bluebells and wood anemones. Lazuline seeps through branches, pools and floods: memories of childhood’s chimeless campanology and carpets of sky. Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to Poets United Midweek Motif ~ […]
Prodigal Soul
Life had become a no-man’s land bristling with blackened stumps and fallen trunks, an ancient bog where once a forest grew – until the fog of despair doused the light that had burned strong and bright, destroyed by passion out of control. Shrouded peat was pocked with charcoal and twisted roots eroded toxic soil. Between […]
Poetry in the Music
I came to poetry through music. My mother was very musical and loved to sing. She had a broad taste and, instead of lullabies, she would perform popular songs of the day to get me to sleep, songs by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra; Harry Belafonte’s ‘Scarlet Ribbons’ (which reminds me of mum) and […]
Phantom Shadorma
snow ghosts drift in a late blizzard rags tattered dignity phantoms of the fantastic suspended in ice and we hide behind heavy drapes misty panes bated breath while winter and spring battle it out once again Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar: Phantom Form – Shadorma Amaya is […]
Sculpting the Coastline Together Again
My fingers itch as I watch clouds racing across a bracing sky. Wind wrestles everything into flux, bowls waves against an unforgiving fractured coast. Sea booms and boasts, spits salty spray, whips hair, seaweed and marram into a melee. My hands tingle with a defiant energy, gather crumbs of cliff and tumbled rocks, melt them […]
writing in north norfolk 