Hallo? I’m sorry for seeming distracted. I’m trying to round up the cats. I need to get them in their baskets. I’ve managed to get the big one in and she’s meowing so mournfully. I so hate to do this to them. The little one’s hiding under the bed. I’m sorry, what was it you […]
Tag: The Poetry School
She-Wolf
Crepuscular dawn of teenage-hood, tainted with tang of menses moon, invokes a howl of sprouting hair in places unexplored as yet. Nobody told us about freefall or the strange sweetness of explosions in the darkness, lit only by the wolfish teeth of a youthful smile. Kim M. Russell, 19th April 2018 sponse to The Poetry […]
Elements of Dragon
What has became of the dragons? Are they in the oceans, leaving trails of scales and seaweed on every rock and shore? Will I hear dragons roar In the echo of a thunderstorm, see tails in forks of lightning or scorched breath in burling clouds? Are there dragons lurking in lava and ore deep within […]
Binding with Briars
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 […]
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 […]