A summer-born child, I lived in my head, I drew, wrote, sang and read, peopling worlds with invisible friends to fill the space where reality ends. Now I feel winter creep into my bones and my poetic graffiti covers the stones, written in lichen of saffron and green; childhood’s buried where it can’t be seen. […]
Tag: Imaginary Garden with Real Toads
Under the Eye of the Clock
Springtime in Paris is here again and all along the banks of the Seine artists are unpacking chalks and oils, canvases, water colours, and easels, ignored by preoccupied passers-by and unaware of the all-seeing eye of the Académie Française clock. Above every one of its ticks and tocks, it’s listening for foreign impurity on the […]
It started with a raindrop…
from a cloud landing in mud. Within hours, shallow streams meander and bubble between banks of flowers burning above the flourishing flood. It gushes on, a convulsive weir, a torrent of energy trying to get back to where it was. The heat of the sun draws it up to a cloud and it becomes once […]
In Bleeding Heart Yard…
pulses quicken at fog-muffled footsteps on the cobbles. Along the soot-soaked lanes, pawn shops and tenements topple, and blackened windows weep tears of grime. They see it all: every good deed and every murderous crime, pickpockets, pimps and paupers, desperate drabs and abused daughters. The dross of life oozes, sobbing and mumbling from the murky […]
Magnificent for a Moment
You spent years underground, a larva, your skin brittle and papery, vulnerable you built your cocoon in darkness as black as your carapace. I found you that day, a jet flash in the May sun basking in the heat of urban concrete. I admired your gloss and spectacular size, a stag among beetles ready to […]
Felicitous Felinity
When our beautiful Tosca was killed two years ago to this day, I thought I would never find such feline companionship again. I didn’t mourn alone. My husband, who found her, was equally stricken, and Luna, who had never been a lone cat, sat in the garden waiting for her mother to return. After months […]
Inside a book…
the mind is free to wander, explore unfamiliar places, push boundaries of space and time, suspend disbelief and hide between the covers, meet new friends and lovers, populate brave new worlds. Pages and seasons turn and so we learn that when a book is closed and night shadows teem, the contents continue to wander through […]
Rescued from Mist and Fog
Unearthly shapes drifted like ghosts, crawled from the sea along the coast, crept along ditches, streams and rivers, unravelling with damp clouds of shivers. They entwined their foggy limbs with mine, misting my sight and nibbling my skin, dissolving my bones as they made a start on feet and legs, then up to my heart. […]
Capricious May
May is capricious, the garden is luscious, bathed in soft sun, daisy and dandelion- spattered. Sky turns bruised plum, sweetly congeals cloud jam, a chiff-chaff’s half-hearted call warning of imminent rainfall. Warning of imminent rainfall, a chiff-chaff’s half-hearted call sweetly congeals cloud jam. Sky turns bruised plum, spattered daisy and dandelion bathed in soft sun, […]
My new job title is…
Infant Inspirer: I’m a singer of songs and narrator of stories, bouncing and rhyming on Wednesdays and Thursdays. I count ducks on my fingers and pigs on my toes, bringing poems and music wherever I go. Kim M. Russell, 10th May 2018 My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Rommy’s Challenge: Job Title Rommy […]
writing in north norfolk 