A flash of amber eyes in the twilight of the woods is answered with a growl from my own throat. I don’t claim to be a good mother, but I can howl and have a fierce heart, red as a hood. I gather them in the heat of my lupine love again, child and grandchild […]
Tag: Wordy Thursday with Wild Woman
Arbutus at Kew Gardens
It’s a lifetime since we rode the red bus from Twickenham to Kew, me and you, and walked among the trees: blossoms in spring and – in autumn – leaves. We listened […]
Spring Cleaning
The old trellis is still standing, top-heavy with verdant honeysuckle leaves and studded with dark pink buds. Below the greenery, old woody branches tangle with dusty shadows, hunchbacked hollows of musty undergrowth. Straining against my hands, secateurs crack and break brittle branches, their sharp echoes scattering birds and, deep inside the remains of an old […]
Patterns of Ice and Water
We are frozen, Ice Age wasteland distilled in our bones and cart-wheeling in the blizzard of the imagination. We move together with clouds, snow and water, in a geometric dance, tessellated into landscapes of free-art fractal frost. We are wind patterns on snow, hoar frost flowers and lonely glaciers until, one morning, the skeins of […]
The Beauty of Scars
The world can’t change its heart of scars, they are tattooed on every inch: silver words of sorrow and hurt birthing poems from blood and dirt, reminding us where we began and giving hope that we might end in a place where everyone appreciates the beauty of scars. Kim M. Russell, 4th April 2019 My […]
This Poem is a Hill, Indigo Water and Whiffling Geese
This poem is a distant hill. This poem is a welter of indigo water. This poem is geese whiffling overhead. This poem is a rolling, breaking wave of corn the colour of honeycomb, washing against the grassy spine of an ancient sleeping dragon, a landslide washed green. This poem is a distant hill. This poem […]
Words and Feet
We welcomed them eighty years ago from the shadows of the night of broken glass to the streets of Britain and beyond, child refugees, hungry and scared, in need of homes. History should not be allowed to repeat itself; it’s our turn to act, to learn from the past and protect children fleeing conflict and […]
To be a Child Again
Now that you are gone, I make a wish on every falling star I see (they are few and far between) to travel back in time, have you tuck me up in bed so tight, sing our favourite lullabies and then kiss me goodnight. I want to know that you’ll be there on Christmas morning […]
The Blue Mountain
was a cold flame on the horizon; it cast a wide-reaching shadow, an other-worldly drift of snow where three royal daughters were trapped by many-headed trolls who loved to have their scalps scratched. Tempted by a generous reward, a soldier arrived with a well-honed sword to make the trolls’ ugly heads roll. The teenage princesses, […]
Mother’s Algebra
Joined still to her mother’s placental algebra, she solves puzzles of love, life and parabola; sucking subtractions at a withering breast, expressing equations many years suppressed. Mathematics learned at the maternal knee curves and circles into geometry. Kim M. Russell, 9th August 2018 My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Wordy Thursday with Wild […]
writing in north norfolk 