I build the spell with witch hazel, a woody frame to brighten gloomy days with spidery flowers in sunset sprays, sublime with spicy scent. I bind the spell with tendrils of evergreen ivy to ward off evil spirits, its heart-shaped leaves glossy with friendship and fidelity. I add some sprigs of rosemary to help you […]
Tag: Tuesday Poetics
Choking Nature
Humans record artistic impressions of patient Nature’s handiwork in a line of wind-tattered trees, a blanket hem along the skyline and curving sculptured hills, where skylarks rise from barley singing, and dissolve into the darkening welkin. Hills become shadows, the silence palpable over still-hot fields. And yet, in boroughs, towns and cities, greedy humans waste […]
Black and White
ebony raven snowy owl coal-black carrion ghost pristine white spirit wing-clipped to the Tower […]
Sick Room
It is the season of drifting scents, honeysuckle morphine in the dark and the ether of phlox and stocks. Outside, the first summer roses fade. He wants to take secateurs, deadhead delicate corpses, but cannot bear to touch petals the colour of bruised skin or inhale the cloying breath of flowers like the ones in […]
Nature Always Finds a Way
In the hedgerow, a robin spills its joy at weeds and wildflowers unfurling and greening cracks in the pavement, graveyards and verges. It cocks its head and blinks its eye at a trembling of finches in the sky with flashes of yellow and bursts of twittering. Nature always finds a way: midsummer’s insects are only […]
Invisible Friends
A summer-born child, I lived in my head, I drew, wrote, sang and read, peopling worlds with invisible friends to fill the space where reality ends. Now I feel winter creep into my bones and my poetic graffiti covers the stones, written in lichen of saffron and green; childhood’s buried where it can’t be seen. […]
In Bleeding Heart Yard…
pulses quicken at fog-muffled footsteps on the cobbles. Along the soot-soaked lanes, pawn shops and tenements topple, and blackened windows weep tears of grime. They see it all: every good deed and every murderous crime, pickpockets, pimps and paupers, desperate drabs and abused daughters. The dross of life oozes, sobbing and mumbling from the murky […]
Amongst other things, cats on the mat
The mouse left on the mat is a present from big cat; she seems to think I’m partial to a rodent, cheeky rascal, and doesn’t understand me when I find dead birds unsavoury. But sometimes she is clever and leaves me just a feather. When I’m tucked up in my bed, little cat sits by […]
Sweetness and Light
A shy nightingale waits until dark, quietly chuckling and snickering at lovers in the park. At moonrise, he crescendos into fluid song, charming lovers and the Milky Way to shimmer more than they did before. Kim M. Russell, 15th May 2018 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Tuesday Poetics: BRAND NAME NOODLING! Lill, our host […]
Loss
Yellow catkins drip from grey willow, catch early morning light through mist. Another season dwindles like smoke or ghosts of long-lost family and friends, and drifts away with my self-worth, my memory, the agility of mind and body. Yet I am are still learning, in my nostalgic yearning, to become untethered like a boat and […]
writing in north norfolk 