I’ve been tuned in to the bassline of my every day, a solitude tuned so low it vibrates in my gut. Above white noise (or is it tinnitus?), the strident call of a crow and the pigeons’ throaty coos counterpoint a blackbird’s song: they have formed the baseline of my Covid day for so long […]
Tag: earthweal
Forgiveness
In the industrial hinterland, stacks belch blue flares, stinking clouds mushroom from smoking fires and orange aureoles radiate and redden the sky of our environmental Armageddon. Will chimneys and factories ever disappear? Will Nature fill the voids of mining year on year? Will a time come when a different kind of steam evaporates across the […]
A Different Life
into this poem I pour all my worries my pleasure […]
Full Swelter
We can’t blame Helios for burning at full swelter, as he has always done. Dedalus may have made the wings but Icarus was drawn, like all who followed sun or moon or Mars and tumbled helter-skelter, mystified by darkness, dazzled by light and heat, aiming for the unknown. We neglected the familiar, colour-blind to Earth […]
Can’t See the Wood
It used to be a rare thing to be lost for words but here I am grasping for synonyms that have slipped down the rabbit hole. I used to write every day but, lately, the air does not move around me. It’s windy outside, the […]
Aghast
The beaches were awash and reeling with sunburnt flesh, already peeling, and tempers flared up in the sun at polite requests to please move on, oblivious to the growing shadow of the Covid reaper. Do they not know the way to measure social distance? After several months of abstinence, entitlement had taken the place of […]
Sprung from Richest Rain
Early spring ice melts channels in mountains, fields and hills, loosens hardened sods under the metal plough’s thunder. Grey crusts and clods break in the furrows’ crumbling wake, surfed by flocks of gulls and crows pillaging carefully crafted rows. Later in the ripening year, earth fulfils the farmer’s prayer; tender growth greens the plain, rapeseed […]
A Little Love Song
You embrace us in your hills and pastures, and suckle us from softly gleaming rivers. You nurture us with fruit, plant and grain, and show us how to grow them all again. You teach us how to flourish together like trees in forests and birds of a feather. And what do we give you in […]
Broken
van Gogh wrote: ‘The conscience is a man’s compass.’ Our compass broke, we have no common sense or sentience, and Earth is barely turning – into a bad joke. We harvest palm oil and rainforests choke, oceans on this so-called blue planet are drowning in a mass of plastic, and fur-coated men grin as polar […]
No More Red
Although in our hearts and souls a fire has taken hold, crimson only burns up the canvas, fuels and lights the war, sticky as blood, congealing the soil and nothing nourishing will grow. The verdure of peace is a welcome balm, it cools the heat and keeps us calm. Kim M. Russell, 9th June 2020 […]
writing in north norfolk 