What has been imprisoned under the lawn all winter? Frozen mud, rendered malleable by spring warmth, releases rusty skeletons of ginger bud cases, last spring’s copper fairy lights. Stones and flint jingle underfoot, sigh a heavy scent from crumbly lumps of black earth, exuding worms from clumps, evicting glossy beetles from ivy tangled in the […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
Waves
“These waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.” Theo van Gogh’s reaction to Hokusai’s ‘Under the Wave off Kanagawa’ Hokusai’s vivid emotion echoes, a great wave of Prussian blues, each line curling, echoing in its own splash, all born of a daily exorcism to limber up the brush: painting […]
Echoes of Bluebell Woods
Between the trees it’s blue, as if the sky had fallen and been transformed into nodding blooms, all-knowing fairy traps of truth. It’s a soft echo of blue, a Beltane pool to dive into and be swept away by a current of old magic. Kim M. Russell, 2017 Image found on Pinterest My response to […]
Sounds from Saturn
Noises from the eerie vacuum inside Saturn’s rings are sucked out, dying silently in the sad, black void. If we listen, we can hear pops and cracks in the near- total emptiness of space tinnitus, of charged particles and atoms, our audio postcards home. Kim M. Russell, 2017 (Picture: EPA) A quadrille for dVerse Poets […]
A Taste for Arsenic
I resist the urge to touch my tongue to the toxic crystals, leaden grey, stir the poison in, although not so long for it to eat the spoon away. Not a year have I been his wedded wife and already his voice has a steely edge like the sharpened blade of the butcher’s knife in […]
Twisted
When I lived in London, I owned a silver Mini Ritz with a brilliant sound system. During the summer holidays, I would take my daughter to work with me as I had a colleague with a girl of the same age and they would play together at her house, which was just down the road. […]
Three Limericks
There was a young astronaut from Earth Who dreamed of space travel from birth. He was so bored in space, He kept feeding his face And returned with a gigantic girth. There was once a young woman from Norwich Who refused to finish her porridge. Her Scottish boyfriend Who came from Hell’s Glen Said, ‘Eat […]
Playground by the Village Hall
On Mondays, the village hall is closed: no community cinema, yoga or bingo. Even the clock has slowed almost to a stop. I crunch across the gravel, past the football pitch, dodge clumps of daisies and jump a little ditch. No dogs allowed inside the playground with its drooping swings, not-so-merry-go-round, empty slide and ropes […]
Fractured by Traffic
On the village green, bones of goalposts lean at both ends of the empty pitch. I ring-a-round-a-rosy, hugging sidelines, daisy-stitched, tanging of cut grass. Each time it passes, it fractures the stillness, the arrhythmic ebb and flow of traffic as it comes and goes. Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille […]
Dancing in the Centre of a Noun
(from Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Anne Hathaway’) Encircling all my words with his,he caressed them with a gentle touch,slipped them on as if they were ashoe, a glove, a familiar verbhe desired for his own; dancingtogether to a melody inquadruple time, echoing thebeat of hearts, we were the centreof the serious ceremony ofthe allemande: we were […]
writing in north norfolk 