ebbtide (not quite haiga)
ebbtide
often too burdened
to get back
haiku: alegria imperial
photo: eleanor angeles
blue notes (haibun)
Another grey day has fallen as a pall on the new calendar as if what makes a difference really doesn’t. Only the ticking clock and the distant squawking of a crow or better yet, complaint, as well as the deep sigh of engines passing by tell the trudge goes on. I look on the cypress with a creeping sense of sorrow. The deep cold has darkened its twigs. Gifts piled beside it now holiday debris. A black garbage bag rests folded in the bin. I gather the cards. The wishes slide off my fingers. A bag of pebbles waits to be planted on the vase. Like wishes that might take root, I would have to water them each day. But for now
blue notes waver under the lamp
my voted haiku in ‘old calendar’ Sketchbook Nov-Dec kukai
old calendar
unmarked laughter
on the torn pages
(5th place)
wall calendar
their wedding month
fifty years back
(8th place)
new year/waiting on the moon
Original caption from NASA: "S103-E-5037 (21 December 1999)--- Astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery recorded this rarely seen phenomenon of the full Moon partially obscured by the atmosphere of Earth. The image was recorded with an electronic still camera at 15:15:15 GMT, Dec. 21, 1999.". Courtesy of wikicommons
new year
waiting on the moon
to bask in the sun
(Note: current moon phase is waxing crescent or 38 percent full)
night hatching dawn (Merry Christmas)
sitting it out
with night hatching dawn
Merry Christmas
***
of the hundreds
in the forest, crow trims
a pine tip
***
twelfth day
my true love bakes for Christmas
a partridge in pear
Love, joy and peace to all of you dear jornales and wordpress friends. We’re on to almost a whole year of sharing such message of the season with poetry. Blessed is how I consider myself having touched you all. This season as I’ve repeatedly said so, I’d like to thank you again. May the New Year find us even more deeply engaged in poetry, hence, in love, joy, and peace.
(Haiku are also posted at NaHaiWriMo under the prompt ‘Christmas’. Image from my camera, one of my many shots–in the dark, literally–of the million lights spangled at Van Dusen Gardens in Vancouver every Christmas.)
waning crescent
waning crescent
the widow draws in an inch
of her mantle
current moon phase from the haiku bandit society’s page. Check it out to read excellent moon viewing haiku…
what’s it/for me…
what’s it
for me who can’t see?
sun patch
Truly an experiment. I’m pushing this poetic form to the edge, it seems to me, learning to risk my foothold–as if I’ve ever had a steady one. But I feel more comfortable in what I’m doing. This perhaps could be the right thing or merely the gateway to a long more arduous path. I can’t see it for now because of sun patches that veil it. But my heart does…here I go justifying myself with truths I once read like ‘it’s only with the heart that one can rightly see, what’s essential is invisible to the eye’ from Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), Antoine de Saint-Exupery
sea froth (my 340th post)
scraping
bottom to reach sky high
sea froth
It’s my 340th post! I never thought I’d get this far. But my fascination with poetry, especially haiku and other forms of Japanese poetry, has since turned into something akin to obsession, or it is already. None of my efforts to learn more and strive for better written lines would be for nothing without you, dear friends, followers and readers. If words do not fall on ground and felt, these turn into dust. But you’ve breathed half of the life I did to them. Thank you all!
About
autumn wind
wondering about lilies
in a mountain pond
Tell me a writer who really gets a satisfying jornal, in Spanish a daily wage or its equivalent, and I’ll bare a spirit in constant bouts of doubtfulness. Does a writer earn more because of what he writes and how he does it? Or is a writer paid more or less because of who he is? Is it money or honor he expects to receive?
Ahhh … but money as wage, and praise or honor as reward would be too predictable, too common as Job lamented in the Book of Job. It is in these lines that read: “Is not man’s life on earth nothing more than pressed service, his times no better than hired drudgery? Like the slave, sighing for the shade, or the workman with no thought but his wages, months of delusion I have assigned to me, nothing for my own but nights of grief. Lying in bed I wonder, ‘When will it be day?’ Risen I think, ‘How slowly evening comes!’
Restlessly I fret till twilight falls. Swifter than a weaver’s shuttle my days have passed, and vanished, leaving no hope behind. Remember that my life is but a breath, and that my eyes will never again see joy.”
Not money but joy is the ultimate wage as the passage implies. And joy is not hard to earn for it is in everyday life if we have eyes to see, a nose to smell, fingers to touch, ears to hear–a heart beating. This to me, is how a writer earns a daily wage. His wages then take the guise of treasures his heart can transfigure into a universe of thought that taps into other hearts, that causes a swirl in the depth of other souls, or that makes wings to sprout on leaden heels.
Sometimes not joy but rueful, poignant moments are my pick. Take what I earned once: On my walk home in my neighborhood, I caught two clumps of snowdrops–such tiny blossoms smaller than fingertips that do not look up but shyly droop close to black patches on the ground winter has frozen. That afternoon in the frosty wind, they trembled as if ready to turn away and run but how could they? For that poignant moment on seeing the wintry rain beat on the fragile snowdrop–as if pushing it to go home now, go to sleep–I earned my jornal, my daily wage.
Once on summer walk, the crackle of dried leaves just hit me both like the laughter of children and sobs long suppressed. Neither one of them would resolve the dryness, but I recalled how each does bring tears: laughter for joy, sobs for healing that comes with the release of a dammed-up pain. My jornal that day came as two haiku.
Fall has since shortened the day and the heart begins to crave for lost space that it doesn’t even recall which or where. I feel that most treasures have turned into mush so much so I wouldn’t be able to sift them off the ground. Yet I caught the dying day yesterday–so glorious in the gold of autumn it opened a flip side of serene heaven. Blades of grass coated in diadems of rain that carpet the lawns render royal walks poor by imitation. A burst of red maple against an inky blue sky humbled me, a soul bragging about her skill to recreate beauty in words.
I suppose I’m taking Job’s reflections to heart. I’d rather not gloss over each day and look beyond what’s there, right before me, or else fragile as is my breath one day “my eyes may never again see joy” to write. With what then will I compare the eternal joy, the ultimate wage I await?
Yet for now, as other eyes hanker to make the invisible visible, I put a tag on some moments of joy. Like on seeing the snowdrops, I paid myself $200 as my jornal.
What could have been yours?
-
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the only sound (Happy New Year)
the only sound
a lamb’s ‘beeehhh’
first adoration
Happy New Year! Wishing you all dear friends, subscribers, followers and readers the best of your wishes for the coming year. And thanking you for your kind, generous and wonderful support of this blog, your encouraging ‘likes’ and your uplifting comments. May we all find the new year a yet another fertile ground for being together in the spirit and joy of poetry
especially of haiku.
Heart-fully yours,
Alegria
December 29, 2011 Posted by alee9 | haiga, poetry | adoration, alegria imperial, comments, Daily life, Daily wage, followers, friends, haiku moment, Happy New Year, jornales, lamb, likes, sound, subscribers, Thank You | Leave a Comment