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 […]
Tag: Open Link Night
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 […]
Flight of a Bright New Poem
It germinates in the slow melody of water glinting in the shallows of the mind’s eye, the interplay of reeds and light that whisper through the open window in the dead of night. A brilliant fluorescence lifts and shifts shape into a metallic demoiselle rising in the mesmeric shimmering of wings, and the early morning […]
The Hollow Sound of Winter
Geese fly overhead, chain-stitched in a skein by the beat of wings. The gaggle alights on a lazy wind, flowing like water into the marshes, their harsh, hollow honks onomatopoeic echoes of winter past present future. Kim M. Russell, 26th July 2018 My poem for dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night This Thursday I’m hosting […]
Careless
Sometimes, I can’t remember who I am. I look at photographs and wonder, where did she go, that carefree girl, that careful mother, so careless with herself? I often feel disjointed, as if part of me has broken off, a branch hanging, buffeted by the wind of time, and wonder, is it mine? When I […]
What is the Essence of a Cat?
Is it a purr or the brush of fur against a human cheek? Is it the curl of a curious tail or the tongue that licks it sleek? Is it a velvet paw, the kneading of sharp claws or a pleading squeak? Is it the surprise of a pair of jade or amber eyes and […]