Weighted with ivy, tessellated with lichen and moss, the roof has splintered and caved in. Perhaps something has settled among the long-forgotten tools and pots – now homes for mice and spiders. Our sentinel by the rickety gate sheds flakes of peeling paint. The padlock key is long gone and its treasures remain hidden. Kim […]
Tag: Open Link Night
Words and Feet
We welcomed them eighty years ago from the shadows of the night of broken glass to the streets of Britain and beyond, child refugees, hungry and scared, in need of homes. History should not be allowed to repeat itself; it’s our turn to act, to learn from the past and protect children fleeing conflict and […]
Promise
We are dazzled by brightly coloured lights the silver, gold and white, hanging above the busy street. Sparkles drip from trees and eaves – even the traffic lights flash with Christmas cheer. Above us, the sky is goose-feather grey, our noses sting with icy air and below our feet the path echoes with winter’s forge. […]
And not forgetting the mist
If I should forget you in the mist of growing old I’ll remember to grasp that mist and not let go. I’ll weave the threads between my fingers, tie knots to help them linger just a little longer to remind me of the autumn mist along the coast and the first time we kissed. Kim […]
Coastal Terzanelle
The coastline is a rugged spine of cliff, its rocky ribs fall and rise with each breath of wind and wave that shifts the distant skiff. Its feet stand firm and solid in the depth of salty water tugging at its bones, ribs falling, rising with each breath. The tides have loosened roots and bits […]
Back from the Deep
A word wrestles between twisted lips, eyes are sunken like two wrecked ships and her nose erupts from a festering face. Dragging behind her a fisherman’s net, hauntingly humming the Flower Duet, she staggers along the pitch-black shore. Studded with limpets and barnacles, lashed with seaweed and pinned with corals, she’s draped in a lacy […]
10th October 1992
(a traced poem inspired by ‘Moment’ by Carol L. Gloor) At the moment of our reunion, I am cooking vegetarian lasagne. No meat, no male scent in this house of females, only the exhaust of distance. I hadn’t seen you in twenty years. I recognised you, the younger you I left behind. I am back […]
Precarious
Throughout the summer, we would tightrope walk along the length of concrete fence that bordered the reality of blocks of flats with smelly lifts, washing like bunting on balconies and the savoury scent of next-door’s dinner. At any moment, our threadbare plimsolls might slip and we could tip to the other side, where trees were […]
The Beauty of Flatness
we wake each day in a flat landscape earth and sky extend to the horizon the only line breaks in this epic poem are corrugations of ridges and furrows ditches choked with waterweed and marsh woundwort’s stout pink heads birds smudge the milky welkin as they slip low over marsh and field spooked by the […]
In the Street of the Sky – a quadrille
Audacious night is out there scattering poems again like snowflakes, frost or fallen stars, all over the street of the sky. Full of wonder, at the open window, all I can do is watch carefully in case night accidentally drops one in my lap. Kim M. Russell, 23rd August 2018 My response to Imaginary Garden […]
writing in north norfolk 