Oh, the anticipation and the reality of warm-kitchen days when hands touched over a huge bowl or fingers gripped together round a wooden spoon in snowstorms of flour and avalanches of butter eggs and sugar both tied up in aprons red-cheeked and bright-eyed mixing and stirring – baking and burning pies and tarts to tempt […]
Tag: Tuesday Poetics
Kafka’s Cage
“I am a cage, in search of a bird” – from The Blue Octavo Notebooks Emptiness echoes off my pretty bars, as polished and shiny as they are and, every day when you pass by, you will hear me heave a sigh. I am a cage trapped here below, gazing into an expanse of blue, […]
Waiting for Sleep to Come
Each night I walk observing graves tended and untended, order and disorder. My head- stone is blotched with moss and lichen, my brief story blotted out. I shimmer in the silver moon- light, skim long grass and weeds dusted with dandelion and thistle seeds between lych gate and porch, where closely-mown grass scorched over summer. […]
Bird Brain
Her brain is a riot of knapweed on which twittering finches feed, keeping her awake at night and drowning out each thought when she rises. She longs to see a chestnut or a walnut tree with broad crown and dangling fruit, or bushes of plump blackberries, but she cannot leave these walls, cannot stretch her […]
Easter at the Salt Marsh
Pale rays of sea aster and heads of lavender smear the salt marsh mauve and purple, a wave of Easter colour, pungent with a salty, muddy scent. Seaside spirits sing a hymn, a cheerful noise, a chink of halyards and a flap of sails, wind, waves and distant whales. Kim M. Russell, 3rd September 2019 […]
Looming
This year, high summer has cast a tidal wave of rhetorical bullshit. We swim in an ocean of it. It’s smeared over every beach, masking the sweet scent of sunscreen with its bitter stink until nothing’s left of August’s decadence. Sunny holidays disappear into autumn shadows, night falls far too soon, and the stench of […]
Bodies
Our bodies unfurl and then curl into each other under night’s cover. We are waves in motion on an inky ocean or sand-blown stones hidden in a desert’s undertones. We are intertwined limbs, hearts, souls and minds, dancing in the dark until we spark – stars falling in the empty sky of morning. Kim M. […]
Meditation on a Leaf
My head fills with chlorophyll, green blood of a mesophyll, as I follow ants and flies on microscopic journeys. Rain-blessed and windblown, leaves leave my mind blown, ecstatic with a peaceful heart, each vein a karmic chart. Kim M. Russell, 6th August 2019 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Poetics: Mindfulness, also linked to Imaginary […]
Woken by a Summer Night
White hot lightning flashes through the blinds, a celestial photographer illuminating crumpled sheets twisted with the lack of sleep. Fiddling with volume control, clouds amplify and dull thunder’s rock and roll, rattling roof tiles and wooden blinds like xylophones. Beside the bed, a glass of tepid water whirlpools with vibrations. Kim M. Russell, 30th July […]
Morning Shift
Together we rise, the bees and I; they fill the drowsy garden with their resonance. A patchwork of shadow among green lungs transforms into a smoky meadow of seeding grass and flowers, patches of shifting light bound together by cobwebs and the hum of bees. Kim M. Russell, 23rd July 2019 My response to dVerse […]
writing in north norfolk 