‘Sayonara’ (a haibun on Fukushima inspired by a tv news reel)

News reel from a Philippine television coverage in Sendai. Families evacuated, the newscaster intones. The Philippine embassy has sent the bus to fetch Filipino-Japanese families to safer Tokyo ground.

we gather our own
in prayer–
a quiet sea

The camera catches fear on young mother’s faces, Filipino mothers, their long straight hair undone by the wind-driven snow. Bundles and backpacks like humps on their slender backs and sides bounce as they race away from shattered homes to the bus, children scrambling along, giant stuffed animal-pillows, dragging them in the danger-laced air. Inside the bus, the camera pans to pillow fights the kids have started, then close-up to a baby asleep, mouth open in lamb-like calm. A mother fusses over a girl’s stuck-up zipper. Mild chaos, more of confusion.

bedtime
lullabies and stories–
the breathing bus
slips into a dream of stars
the old moon grins

Camera returns to the scene left behind, focuses on a man in wordless soundless grief waving his hand as if in a quiet dance of despair, sometimes folding his arms as if to stem the flow of pain. He had opted to stay, the newscaster sustains his even tone. How could he leave? To leave one’s life behind is to die. To lose perhaps, never to see a wife and child again? That’s also death. The camera pans back to the desolate street. The bus moves away.

Sayonara
he waves mutely
in the falling snow
the bus swallows steam
wife and son and tears

Sendai sea–
how far is the other side?

NB

Posted soon after the tragic calamity but I deleted it when I included it to a call for submission for the anthology just published, “We Are All Japan”. Never did get any response from the editors but apparently, it was declined. Just learning how to craft both haibun and tanka then, a year ago. But I’m posting it again for what it’s worth, hoping you would feel what I felt.

The tangential connection of the tsunami destruction and my haibun comes from a personal history between Japan and the Philippines. During that unfortunate war (WWII), many families lost their fathers without goodbyes, my mother’s family, for one. Hardly ever spoken about in my childhood, I grew up nonetheless with a heavy pall of sorrow from the absence of a grandfather whom the Japanese Imperial Army excuted before I was born. No corpus was ever found but tales of how he was made to kneel for beheading abound. When I watched the news reel from a Philippine tv channel, it touched me deeply and from that core of pain this haibun wrote itself out.

if i could linger (my tanka at LYNX June 2012)

if I could linger
under trees, i would implant
myself to bar
the wind from luring petals
to their deathly dance

LYNX XXVII: June 2, 2012

cherry blossoms at Sakura Park, Upper West side, New York

the sun’s footfalls (random lines not quite haiku)

…this is really me, writing, unshackled by poetic (all forms, genres) discipline. Call me untamed, even feral. I’ll agree. But this is my true spirit that I must let roam once in a while like today. 

*

burnt orange the sun’s footfalls

moon flitting
from staccato dawn
an owl hoots

a scrabbling in the pine copse raccoon eyes

is the fox a man in his dream?
snow melt

zebra
snorts
at jet stream
moonset

ivy wall
in its shadowed side
sunlit sighs

spring song, 3rd place in Blossom Rain’s 1st Haiku My Photo Challenge

My haiku won 3rd place in Chrissi Villa’s Blossom Rain 1st Photo Challenge. The invitation was for haiku poets to write a haiku on a photo. 1st place winner is friend, Sanjukta Asopta. Here’s mine and the comment of the judge, Kirsten Cliff:

spring song
how it draws the heart
to reflection

I’m a fan of alliteration and loved the phrase “spring song” on first reading. It works with the photo and then immediately draws the reader to look outside the borders for further signs of spring. The poet here like the first two, has reminded the reader of Nature’s song, of the life essence that is all around us and part of us. And also like the above two haiku, the auditory sense of the reader is engaged, which lifts the photo to another level. The final lines “how it draws the heart/ to reflection” worked to draw me deeply into the centre of the photo, and deeper into the experience as a whole.

Kirsten Cliff

 

Here’s the link or click on Blossom Rain in my blogroll:

http://blossomrain.blogspot.ca/2012/05/results-of-1st-haiku-my-photo-challenge.html

‘pine strand’ one of 365 haiku on your mobile phone

Read a haiku-a-day on your mobile phone. Yes, simply access your haiku app and anyone of the 365 haiku would show up as you click or shake your screen. You might read mine:

pine strand
flailing in night sky—
the first low star

Alegria Imperial
Lynx XXIII (2008)

The Haiku Foundation Haiku app Data Base 2012

‘duayya’ (lullaby): taking a break from haiku to free verse

the birds will soon forget
how much the sun cradled the flowers
to bear the seeds
so easily borne
in the wind
so swift
to scatter to land
and bed and root
and be transformed

but for now the singing
heightens
each day as the sun begins
a lullaby
so unlike us
so unaware of our songs
we bloom and bed
and scour around
so we may seed
you and i
but fail to find a lullaby

so swift to turn away to forget
why we held hands in the moonlight

 Also posted at my other blog, inner spaces, at http://gimperial.wordpress.com

*duayya (lullaby in Iluko of the northernmost region of the Philippine archipelago, my native tongue)

‘some nights’ & ‘come feel’, 2 more tanka from GUSTS Spring/Summer 2012

some nights
the moon hides its face
for healing
like our other side
that needs to be unseen

come feel
this frozen bud
let’s learn
from its tight lips
the secret of roses

GUSTS 15 Spring/Summer 2012, Tanka Canada

Four-year old Miriya took this tanka to carry in her pocket: Poem in Your Pocket Day

The future of poetry especially of tanka and haiku is secure; it’s in the hands of Miriya, the four-year old daughter of poet friend Christina Nguyen. Miriya found my tanka in GUSTS 15 of  Tanka Canada, which also has her mom’s and many other known friends, that apparently her mom was reading and had laid down with the page open where this tanka is. Christina told me she read it and asked to read it to her again, and in the end, asked her to write it down on a post-it so she can carry it in her pocket to read again and again. I’m not flattered but deeply honored. An angel has taken hold of my poetry, hence, in heavenly hands. It’s beyond any other honor I ever hope to achieve. Thank you Miriya and Christina.

was it you
who laid this feather
on my feet
seeking my forgiveness
in the rain?

GUSTS 15, Spring 2012

My Most Beautiful Thing: an odd rainbow (so far)

(a haibun diary entry)

…the walk I had written you about did happen at a bird sanctuary estuary from the arm of the Fraser River that we know and a beach, first on foot paths that slithered among reeds and sedge grass taller than me, blushes of wild daisies with red hearts and knots like hairs on tips of red cloud weeds, getting wilder as the path deepened into the trees, the air singing with chirps and love calls or chatter rising from the thick clumps of more grass by the water’s edge—a gravel walk finally came to view and out of the canopy of brambles the sky spanned out with a swatch of pink, unlike the tender pink dabs we had waken some dawns but more like an odd rainbow of pinks we haven’t seen yet, straying from the sun’s aureole, but as if only for show because it began thinning out into a breath as the walk curved toward the river shore, same sands we would braid our steps on those mornings that summer a year ago and so, imagine me recalling us

sinking feet in the sand
we draw the tide line
closer to our morning

(My Most Beautiful Thing “blogsplash” celebrates Fiona Robyn’s new novel, The Most Beautiful Thing.)

‘fox moon’, a tanka sequence at Yay Words on ‘fox dreams’

fox moon

must it always be
this light
that draws your anguish
so feared so misunderstood?

your paws
on thawing banks the tracks
you left for me
as if I’ve lost you in
the moon’s shifting moods

silence
the midnight wind sends
you howling
always you miss my whispers
shushing your longings

in dappled shadows
the fire burns in your eyes
singes rustling leaves
you step in the moonlight
where we lay down your embers

come out of hiding
what greater fate is there
that awaits
than for us to bare our desires
we live for this and this alone

Thrilled to share my first in Aubrie Cox’s creative blog, Yay Words, included in a collection of poems by 34 known and published haiku/tanka poets on ‘fox dreams’. So honored to have my work alongside theirs. Thanks again to Aubrie for this wonderful project.  Check it out at http://yaywords.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/fox-dreams/  Or click on ‘Yay Words’ on my blogroll.

Image of silver fox courtesy of wikipedia commons, photo by Zefram