When you lose someone, the world warps: a comma butterfly (settling on a nettle) distorts – flicks open wings to burnish, only to crisp in the sun. When you lose someone, summer colours tarnish; tastes and smells curdle like mouldy blackberries on a parched tongue, and all the while you long to hear their voice, […]
Tag: Meeting the Bar
Caged Moon (a septet)
Willows, the anchors of life, felted with silvery grey, captured the moon and his wife in a basket canopy, where daddy longlegs rattle and candle flies do battle: at the end of a hot day. Kim M. Russell, 19th July 2018 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar: Septets This Thursday, Frank Hubeny […]
Measuring Time
When the whole world measured time in light and dark, descent and climb, civilisation was still new my child, an infant just like you. One drab June, we wandered ancient grounds, round rain-soaked prehistoric mounds, counting a nursery rhyme of stones. We imagined thousands of dawns and shadows pierced by shafts of light – the […]
Sonnet for my students
My students’ eyes are nothing like the sun, it is as if they are not yet awake; they yawn and shuffle in, but never run, until it gets to time for morning break. I have seen some of them arrive on time, to smile at me and greet me at the door. It is delightful […]
Autumn Ripe
I am no gaunt, leafless winter hawthorn: my trunk is not gnarled nor are my branches a twisted mass, no dark hoard of barbs. I am not creamy froth on outgrown hedges, no early dog rose drenched in dew or sun. I dance and rustle with fallen leaves and glow with autumn fruit, nut and […]
A Molotov Cocktail of Poems
I put my poems […]
Aporia Avenue
Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage we did not take; instead we took the avenue of apathy, moonful children exploring half-hearted graveyards with lichen-covered stones over row upon row of mouldering bones. What was at the end of the passage, the one we did not take? A message of hope, a future of […]
Rubai of Light
The moon is a balloon that fills the night which bursts with stars and constellations bright, reminding late night lovers of the dawn whose fingers shatter dreams with early light. Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar: Variations on the Rubaiyat This week our host for Meeting the Bar […]
Beginning a Poem with a Line By Heaney
To flood, with vowelling embrace, a page agape at my pen’s impudence, is to leave wounds of words upon its face, carved with the sharp and flat of consonants. Blood is ink dried in thirsty lines and margins, annotated stanzas, editor’s cut and thrust. All the while my stack of notebooks burgeons, shrouded in poetry […]
A South London Childhood
Balconies and concrete stairs, beery piss in broken lifts, every night the same old prayers, someone get us out of here. Tightrope walking on the fence, leap the gap between the sheds, long walk to the traffic lights, sideswiped by a motorbike. Buttercups and dandelions crowd long grass by rusty gates; in the alley, shadows […]
writing in north norfolk 