Along the beach, birds are returning from the Arctic; waders stop off to picnic in a brightly moonlit stretch of sandy slime: oystercatchers, sandpipers, curlews and snipe. Excited piping and haunting mournful cries follow us home where we are greeted by a kaleidoscope of moths congregating around the halo of the porch light: crumpled leaves […]
Tag: Imaginary Garden with Real Toads
Summer Clothes
Summer permeates a single layer of cotton: a fluttering dress, a baggy shirt or colourful sarong. Unwrapped from woollen layers, we can breathe, clothed in flags of freedom, rippled by the breeze. On the beach, the sea sparkles and lures us in; we bare our bodies and the sun smiles on our warm skin. Kim […]
Heavy Plant Crossing
The country road tilts and blends into a sudden blind bend, overhung with bush and tree, so dense that, at first, I do not see a red and white sign erupting from a pile of soil: heavy plant crossing. My imagination runs riot with giant hogweed and triffids evolved from seeds that drifted down from […]
Turnstone Insomnia
On the rocky shores of just after midnight and well before wave-break of day, turnstones tip pebbles, clatter in my head, and run across my shipwrecked bed, drenched with shadow-spray. Kim M. Russell, 2017 Image found on rspb.org.uk My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Of Insomnia and Sleep In today’s prompt, Sanaa has […]
Fay Watson and the Empty Chair
You want me to sit on what you think is an empty chair? Not while he sits there, his soft blond hair matted with blood, face grey as the smoke from the gun I pressed to his head. He’s not dead to me, he’s locked in my brain, a bloody stain I can’t scrub clean. […]
We saw it on the news…
a couple of hours after emerging from theatre darkness into the rain-streaked copper lightness of a warm summer’s Saturday night; Londoners and tourists alike streamed into the Underground, unaware that on London Bridge people were falling down, run down by extremists, and Borough Market was being knifed in the beat of its open, friendly heart. […]
Arcadia Revisited
Return with me to the safe embrace of mountains, a poetic place where sky kisses sea. Come sail with me above crashing waves, to sandy bays with hidden caves, an unspoiled wilderness, where mermaids lilt silvery melodies, descant to the ocean’s harmonies, in praise of the exquisiteness of Arcadia. © Kim M. Russell, 2016 Image […]
Guitar Sunsets
My passion as a teenager was playing the guitar, contorting fingers into chords and positions, resonating waltz and polka from the sound hole of a Yamaha, plucking delicate arrangements of Bach and Scarlatti. Now my fingers will not stretch across neck and frets, too stiff and sore to press on strings, too clumsy for harmonics […]
Found in the Night Sky
look up and watch the cosmic summer frolic when the sun rises early to touch the Northern Tropic our lunar neighbour fattens, waxes, comes nigh then scoots past and sails on by leaving Saturn and Jupiter to light up the night sky Kim M. Russell, 2017 Image found on Pinterest A found poem, picked from […]
Granddad’s Garden
Confined to house and wireworks walls, he was a caged animal picking tiny nuggets of copper from boot soles like thorns from paws. Every week day, at one for dinner and at five for tea, deep in the fabric of his work clothes and his very being, he carried home the metallic tang of blood […]
writing in north norfolk 