My grandmother always peeled an apple with grandfather’s penknife, careful, keeping it all in one piece. I watched it twirl and curl, with a whiff of sweetness, pinched between her fingers. She taught me a rhyme, that we said every time: apple peel, apple peel, tell me true, who am I going to get married […]
Tag: Tuesday Poetics
Tread Gently
Tread gently in this skyscape,where a single cloud can weighheavy on the soul. Some escape;cumulonimbi the shade of sludgebluster grumpily across the skyuntil the sun sets, and blackbirds trill in hedges. An owl hoots a reply,to a distant barking dog.It is then that I see dead people, looming like vaporous fog,and left-over dust and gasestransform […]
Ode to Dylan Thomas
You did not go gentle through your life, knocked hard for flesh to let you enter, soul-shaken by your mother and your wife, thistledown-free and unafraid of winter. You, self-confessed gusty man and a half, languished in whisky and bitter-sweet ale, like the Dewi singing, ready with a laugh and a rhyme like a spouting […]
Indigo
They called her Indigo, not the name of a goddess, but Greek all the same, meaning Indian dye. She’s the turning of twilight, the tint of an iris that blooms in the garden or the depth of an eye. Her name gives her freedom to stride where she pleases in new jeans the blue of […]
The Wherryman’s Return
Once I was lost in Norfolk mist that dims the view of wherrymen, grips you like a watery fist and pulls you further to the fen. I left her at the cottage door, waving with her handkerchief; it was the very last time she saw me, my darling widowed wife. But I still wander past […]
Bridging Seasons
Winter walked a thin, tight lightamong skeletal trees, so brightagainst the ashen sky. Quietsnowflakes painted branches white ~or were they glittering stars? ~ fluttering petals, opening buds,kissed by sun emerged from cloudsand birds that greeted spring aloud –to leave us fresh and greenly boughed. Kim M. Russell, 27th April 2021 My response to dVerse Poets […]
Crows Calling at Night
Crows in the boughs remind her of her distant home, the man she left behind. Perhaps he listens to the patter of the rain, the cawing of the roosting birds, and thinks of her. So alone, she lies down on her bed, her crow black eyes like stones. Kim M. Russell, 20th April 2021 Image […]
Traces of an Elephant’s Tears (Empathy)
I feel the tears, although there is only a trace now. Just like the baby elephant, alone in the zoo, abandoned with only a memory of the mother it will never forget. And what about the mother’s tears? The tears of the herd? It is not absurd that my maternal instinct rears in despair at […]
Adrift
You square no one, rain and earthneglect the thrust and seduction ofyour repulsive cell. Always adrift inthe same vast night, nobody putsup a fight and sits tight, cosmosand black hole of anybody’s wrongdestroying another darkness, horneffects of addiction, after you misseach other. Sit it out for the first time […]
Soap Opera
The machine rumbles,bubbles with the scentof her favourite detergent,lending lightness to the drudgery,the air soap-shimmeryin a slant of spring sun. He sits on the oppositebench in the launderettewatching his washing tumblein the drier with a syncopatedrhythm, the clunk and clickof buttons and zips. The drier stops.She smiles, handshim a basket,into which he dropseach item. All […]
