The mirror in the garden pond is cracked with rushes, irises, rotting leaves and watercress; a single poppy lingers on, pale petals promise oblivion. In the mirror of the garden spade, a toad with its glittering topaz gaze, legs akimbo and puffed up body dangles from the shiny blade, toxin flooding warty membrane. Mirror, mirror […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
No Cinderella
I don’t need to change into a princess or a pumpkin, a glass slipper or a mouse. Poetry does that with its ins and outs of words and rhymes, the ups and downs of stanzas and lines. Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Tuesday Poetics: Change Paul is our host today […]
Best Laid
These days I don’t lay my pen down while I think – it’s a computer mouse, which has reminded me of Robert Burns, his wee timorous Mousie and best laid plans. I have the messiest desk and study, with piles of correspondence, letters, poems to submit and paper to recycle, as well as my boxes […]
Comfort
I shiver in the empty white field, watch as snowflakes melt on my lashes, nibble frozen stalks of grass, icy glass against my chattering teeth. They fall heavy in my hollow gut. The sun’s long up, milky drops through bulky clouds. Crows throw stark shadows in lacy branches that move with the hours until the […]
Seabirds
Sullen and slate-grey, the sky lights up slowly, in its own good time, rinsed with lemon luminescence, a bleached handkerchief embroidered with distant gulls. Smaller seabirds, snatched by the polar wind, flutter like leaves, tumbling acrobats that land and curtsey on salt encrusted rocks. Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille: […]
Baring your Soul
Sand is resistant to your feet and teases tight muscles in your thighs. You brave the boisterous breeze buffeting distinctive scents of salt and life. Through a pall of blue spray the sun burns bronze, then vanishes altogether; you close your eyes on the drab despair of weather. Screaming gulls spill into the sea and […]
Air Taxi
Oh for a taxi that doesn’t bump and jolt, brake sharply at traffic lights, speed off into a rainy night leaving me behind. Balloons would be nice, of various colours and sizes, to make the journey smooth and a driver whose opinions are few and far between, so I can enjoy the airiness and comfort […]
Owl Encounter
We were driving across the flat North Norfolk landscape after a visit to my father-in-law, dark beet fields stretching out on both sides of the road and no other vehicles to be seen. It was dusk, the clouds were low and the car’s heater couldn’t shake the chill in the air. Light was fading fast. […]
Ode to a Stranded Whale
You beach your beautyon the back of geo-magnetic storms. Spellbinding as pulsating northern lights,you offered songs to the nightbut were drawn by siren stars, lured off course and hurledthrough waves of coronal mass ejection,fought hard to correct your navigation. You collided with the shoreand now you lie, exposedto the cosmos, foamy flukes glinting in starlight,your […]
All-Seeing
Hourglass of stars, minted in a nebula not too far from Mars, bloodied rust of cosmic dust fills the sky – all-seeing eye. Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Poetics: Lookin’ Up! Lillian is our host for this Tuesday’s Poetics and she says she would like us all to look up […]
writing in north norfolk 