There was a time whenI knew nothing about life on thecoast: how the shore is buffeted by wind;waves spray salty brine above dunes; andseals follow you, riding thewaves glittering in morning light. Now I know the sound of gulls, they arethe music of the sea, laughing at humans workingon boats. Gulls know the beauty of […]
Tag: Seamus Heaney
On reading Heaney’s ‘Gifts of Rain’
The recent rain has left puddles,cars shower walkers with chilly wavesand tractors churn up mud. Burst riverbanks leave us in a muddle,fields and gardens lost, animals to save,as we wrangle with the flood. On the other side of the world it’s dry,all moisture wrung out, no dripping taps,just an arid cough of dust. There’s not […]
The Day the Traffic Stood Still
For weeks there had been an unusual increase in activity in the night sky, which had begun to leak into daytime; massive meteors, fiery shooting stars and UFOs were reported every day, and crowds of people were leaving urban areas for mountains, coastal and forest regions, causing chaos in all kinds of traffic. Holding its […]
Sounding Out Spring
Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.The mildest February for twenty yearsIs mist bands over furrows, a deep no soundVulnerable to distant gargling tractors. Seamus Heaney In the north, the Ploughis ridden by the moonand frost continuesto clench the earth.Early morning walkingwakens words,enlivens lines from puffsof frozen breath,vowels ploughed into other: opened ground. Punctuated by stoneand root, […]
Whoku
Irish soil stuck to his honest pen Seamus Heaney Kim M. Russell, 4th December 2019 I woke up this morning with this whoku in my head. Two things inspired it: Patricia’s Poetry Pea podcasts and the wonderful BBC2 programme about Seamus Heaney, which I watched on Saturday night and highly recommend. It’s called ‘Seamus […]
Poem
Long gone are days of turf and mud, green fields rising in mist and rain; old cords were cut and never tied again, but ours endures, a cord of blood. We have squared the fairy ring of mushrooms, magical and bathed in dew, we’ve come full circle, me and you, my changeling born in autumn […]
Reined by Strings
Kim M. Russell, 10th April 2019 My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Poems in April Day 10: Open a Book For the tenth challenge of this NaPoWriMo, Anmol with like us to pick up any books lying closest to us or pick them from our bookshelves: poetry collections, novels, dictionaries, telephone directories… we […]
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 […]
Still Shy
After all these years she still wears that Bardot scarf and flats are de rigeur for evening saunters by city rivers. With a falter of shallow breath, she stumbles on uneven pavement of the embankment between streetlights, a sunset blush on her cheeks. He carefully grips her arm, feels her fluttering heart, no longer hawk […]
Weaving
A weaver, when she has prepared her loom, Lifts and depresses threads using a comb, A rigid heddle to help create a gap And stop the cloth collapsing in her lap. She knots and loops a rainbow of design With different wools and silks, both thick and fine, Depending on the outcome of it all: […]
writing in north norfolk 