I bind you with a hedge of spiteful briars from the ensorcelled heart of a midnight forest, a rose hidden from men’s desires for a hundred years incanted in a white-hot rage of Beltaine blossom on a thorny cage. Young men will come to press their suit; I’ll pluck and spear their ripened fruit, stick […]
Tag: Prompt
Self-portrait in front of a misty mirror
The glass is cold to touch, fogged up with early morning bathroom steam. A drop of condensation rolls from top to bottom, clearing worm-holes where pupil matches pupil. Nose as close as glass allows before my breath steams up the gap, I see her eye, the cerulean I would drown in as a child, the […]
Natural Maths
clement weather strips patina strips wizened bark of winter […]
Pond
In next-door’s garden there’s a sparkling circle of water, unruffled by wind and rain. I often wonder if the refection of leaves and clouds, if its pristine perfection has ever been cracked, shattered by the density of stone, […]
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 […]
How to Approach a Supernova
Ten Don’t get too close. Nine You are no super-human astronaut in the thrall of a brutal, brilliant cosmic flash. Eight Keep away from powerful explosions brighter than the Milky Way. Seven You know, it may not be a supernova. Six It may well be the freaky death throes of a star, torn apart by […]
A Rag Man
The beginning of the day is drab, no inspiration for an ageing bard who, in his callow youth aspired and now knows only bleak despair. No longer a willow sprouting green, he searches for a fitting genre for the wires in his hoary beard. He prays his muse won’t leave him bared for all to […]
A Poem for a Poet
The words that flow or inch their way from germ of thought to lips, to point of nib, or fingertips on keys, can only be caught if you set them free. They are yours to do with what you will. But when another speaks your words, awake or in the depths of sleep, or writes […]
Quoting Geese
With wing beats eiderdown slow, wild geese create a river, an open sky of feathers. One drops, a stone, a twist and it regains control, stomach up, gliding on its back. A moment of disorder and the unpicked skein weaves into plump finger quotes. Kim M. Russell, 7th April, 2018 My response to The Poetry […]
Red Shoes
Heels tapped on the pavement, cracked red patent flashed ’Stop!’ but she could only go despite the pinch on her little toe and the blisters rubbed raw by red shoe leather, lucky pumps borrowed from her sister. No shoes of her own, no trainers, boots or sandals to her name; everything sold to fund her […]
writing in north norfolk 