Wide-eyed and full of wonder, you hold my hand and guide me through your world. I can only blunder, an ancient alien who has lived here too long to appreciate a single leaf, a muddy pebble or the sun on water. Now I have your eyes to discover the beautiful among the fearful, forget for […]
Tag: What’s Going On?
Making Pastry
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 […]
Sounds of Water
The quacking and chuckling of ducks and ducklings leads to the meadow, among the stones and grasses just where the gurgling river passes in its sinuous windings. Rapid water purls, not just between the banks but into ponds and ditches, fields and streams, and the convulsive weir pool where I stop to dream and breathe […]
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 […]
Red Shoes
Heels tapped on the pavement, cracked red patent flashed ’Stop!’ but she could only go despite the pinch on her little toe and the blisters rubbed raw by red shoe leather, lucky pumps borrowed from her sister. No shoes of her own, no trainers, boots or sandals to her name; everything sold to fund her […]
Someone Else’s Shoes
I’ve walked more than a mile in someone else’s shoes, suffered painful corns and blisters in my quest to empathise, to see things from other points of view. I’ve danced in well-worn hobnail boots, balanced on purple patent platforms, even worn in a brand new pair of pumps. But I never braved stilettos, and I […]
Seabirds
Sullen and slate-grey, the sky lights up slowly, in its own good time, rinsed with lemon luminescence, a bleached handkerchief embroidered with distant gulls. Smaller seabirds, snatched by the polar wind, flutter like leaves, tumbling acrobats that land and curtsey on salt encrusted rocks. Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille: […]
Ode to a Stranded Whale
You beach your beautyon the back of geo-magnetic storms. Spellbinding as pulsating northern lights,you offered songs to the nightbut were drawn by siren stars, lured off course and hurledthrough waves of coronal mass ejection,fought hard to correct your navigation. You collided with the shoreand now you lie, exposedto the cosmos, foamy flukes glinting in starlight,your […]
Fairy Tale Reflections
an ugly ducklingreflects in an autumn ponda magical swan Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to Carpe Diem #1269 reflection, also linked to Sherry’s prompt at What’s Going On? on 19th June 2024 At the end of the first week of Carpe Diem’s celebration month, our prompt for today from memory lane is ‘reflection’. Chèvrefeuille […]
The Loss of Intimacy
She bustles in, weighed down with his clean underwear, pyjamas, barley water and boiled sweets, his reading glasses, now repaired, holding back wisps of her grey hair. She has to catch the bus at the same time every day and sit for hours, making repetitive small-talk with a man who doesn’t know her name, has forgotten, […]
writing in north norfolk 