I have yet another one of my poems “Dance” published at The Drabble:
https://thedrabble.wordpress.com/2020/02/08/dance/
The Drabble is a site dedicated to publishing original fiction, non-fiction, and poetic works of 100 words or fewer. Go check it out, the short fiction is amazing —as, of course, is the poetry!
The long dance of winter
starts slow as starlight
children stamping hard cold ground
cracking ice over peat
Slipping through fog’s silence
the women have donned heavy antlers
to creep around the trees
circle the swamp
clasp hands and spin
as the sun spins and turns
so do they
Men spurt from the longhouse
Pelts moist with sweat
Leap and cry out
Songs build to a crescendo again and again
until the true sun reveals herself
and we put out our puny fires
sit
eat
laugh
Copyright © 2019 Kim Whysall-Hammond
I haven’t written a poem imagining our pre-historic ancestors for a long while. Others on this blog can be found at:
https://thecheesesellerswife.wordpress.com/2019/01/30/crafty-eyes-see-the-deer-2/
https://thecheesesellerswife.wordpress.com/2019/06/22/the-aurochs-and-the-pink/
https://thecheesesellerswife.wordpress.com/2019/08/07/we-live-on-the-high-ground-2/
When a poem dances with your thoughts
Sunlight and shadows mark the walls of your soul
Something echoes within
You change
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
We wade though the bright grass
Tired, footsore, happy
Hearing a bird calling by the reeds
Notes curling amongst themselves,
Spinning through the warm air
Distantly, traffic busies itself,
Here, tranquility reigns,
After a full night dancing,
We walk.
Copyright © 2016 Kim Whysall-Hammond
By the door of the living room
away from the adults
a girl dances.
Lost in her own world
lost in shadows
dreaming unknown incandescent things
that even now she cannot fathom.
But the echoes of those dances
float across years.
Each subsequent dance
at a wedding or festival
evoking something
until she finds, in middle age
a need and urge to dance again
to feel the echoes, sense the incandescence.
Just once more.
Copyright © 2018 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Originally published at (along with Boy Migrant, Watercolour time and The overwhelming sky) at http://www.longshotisland.com/2018/01/26/bridge-poems/
I am delighted to tell you that a collection of my poems have just been published on Longshot Island:
http://www.longshotisland.com/2018/01/26/living-poems/
Regular readers of this blog will recognise three poems, which have appeared here in a slightly different form. ‘Dance’ will be new to you however.
When a poem dances with your thoughts
Sunlight and shadows mark the walls of your soul
Something echoes within
You change
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
We wade though the bright grass
Tired, footsore, happy
Hearing a bird calling by the reeds
Notes curling amongst themselves,
Spinning through the warm air
Distantly, traffic busies itself,
Here, tranquility reigns,
After a full night dancing,
We walk.
Copyright © 2016 Kim Whysall-Hammond
(written after a Ball at Wolfson College, Oxford, hence the photo)
Re-blogged from 2016
“Its not cool anymore
To play the funky music”
Grooving to a bass line
Seems now superseded
By repetitive hard rhythms
Harmonically sparse vamping
Is not something cool guys do
Soft sophistications
Lost to hard beats and rap
Oh to be lost in the complexities
Of chords extending and rhythms moving
To hear those altered ninths
To dance to a jazzy downbeat
Be lifted by the horns
Feel the music flowing
Through mind and body
Let’s get Funkensteins monster
Back on the dance floor
Spark that electricity
Syncopate that heartbeat
Bring the F-beat back to life….
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
….I’ve been listening to a lot of 1970s funk recently……….
