We need iron in our blood to carry oxygen from lungs to cells, and yet iron left in damp air will rust and its shiny grey will crust with red. The earth is rich and hard with iron, mined for making steel, its solidity tempered and twisted into buildings, pylons and bridges, and its smoothness […]
Tag: Tuesday Poetics
New Day Dawning
Eerie moonlight lingers among broken trees and last night’s feathered singers’ dwindling melodies descend into kaleidoscopic dreams, leak into pointillistic skyscapes of fading stars, scattering promises of dew and dawn and the breath of a brand-new day. Kim M. Russell, 17th December 2019 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Poetics: New Year – New World […]
Echoes of Christmas
Suspended on the air, the tang of dead leaves, breath of wood smoke, tingle of frost and echoes in twilight. A full moon, pearly white touches reflections splintering the night, tinged with bright Christmas lights. Twinkling headlights, streetlight’s glow, and intimate lamp-lit windows remind us that now it’s time to go home. In the darkening […]
Of Clouds and Sea
No sky’s completely cloudless, there are clouds we cannot see, tiny breathless drops of hope above a hopeless sea. Although we know it’s boundless, and its waves forever restless, human beings can be feckless in the ocean’s cold embrace, and our bodies spiral, weightless, to the bottom of the sea. But our atoms, although formless, […]
Nettles
We are not subtle, although we blend, green in the midst of green, our sting, our poison bating our green breath with not a quiver. Hiding in the green, we remain unseen, waiting pungently for a patch of skin a recipient for our histamine; we long to puncture a scarlet tattoo, stinging souvenirs. Our hairy, […]
Sharp Teeth
I grew up to the sound- track of waves all around this tiny little island where trees offer cool shade and fruit of the brightest colours the one setback was the sharks that lurked in the water and fed on my family bled it dry drop by drop until it was just me in the […]
Early Morning Visit from the Owl
In the early hours of morning, my heart swooped from birch to willow when an owl called at the window, a fluty, chilly shiver. Through the tilted slats of the blind, the honeyed amber flash of eyes and fluttering ‘You-ooh-ooh’ drew me to the frost-kissed pane, froze my breath in a cloud of ‘Oh!’ as […]
Star Birth
How much gas does a mother need? Forget the air – there’s none in space. Energy and gravity played their part, pulling together at the heart of the conception, a passionate ménage à trois. A single push excruciatingly long, squeezing an interstellar nebula into a brand-new star, a twinkle in its mother’s eye, a cosmic […]
Without black there would be no contrast
nowhere to hang the moon and stars fireworks and bonfire sparks no colour to express the dog of depression no clarity of words in books no shadows in the sleep-soaked room at night the pair of complicit magpies haunting the garden (two for joy) would be all white their once glossy jet feathers and impertinent […]
Your Voice
I have heard songbirds’ over- lapping whistles, the whisper of sparrow wings wheeling on the breeze, raindrops bouncing off dusty autumn paths, and the rattling somersaults of the last leaves from trees. I’ve listened to the sun sizzle into evening, bats flicker in cooling twilight air, snowflakes kissing a frozen window- pane, a cat purring […]
