some of my spring haiku with French translation by Serge Tome@tempslibres.org
gray spring dawn-
the shiver of daffodils
in my bones
aube grise de printemps -
le frisson des jonquilles
dans mes os
this cold-
Sakura cherry blossoms
on my window
ce froid -
fleurs de cerisiers Sakura
à ma fenêtre
this sunless spring day
chickadees chatter on-
my indecisions
ce jour de printemps sans soleil
les mésanges discutent -
mes indécisions
watching rain
drum beat on window pane–
the deaf cat
il regarde la pluie
tambouriner sur la vitre –
le chat sourd
spring fever–
shoots among the lilies
she can’t name
fièvre de printemps –
des pousses parmi les lys
qu’elle ne peux nommer
tempslibres.org
under moody rains
The Golden Gate Bridge refracted in raindrops acting as lenses by Mila Zinkova courtesy of wikicommons
on paved walks
tracing the patchwork i lost
under moody rains
(posted on NaHaiWriMo under ‘loss’ prompt by Carlos Colon)
grapefruit bite (kigo)/drum beating (free format) my haiku in Shiki Kukai Sept 2011
grapefruit bite
sweeter with each
cloud let go
2 votes (from peers)
Kigo: citrus Shiki Kukai Sept 2011
The original haiku which I edited at the last minute reads:
grapefruit bite
sweeter with each
dark cloud let go
I wonder if by taking out the adjective ‘dark’ I wrote a vague haiku. Or I think the shift or juxtaposition to a metaphor (dark cloud) failed.
drum beating
to clear skies
rain on the roses
0 votes
Free format: rain Shiki Kukai Sept 2011
I read this now and say, ‘Huh?’ What did I want to say when I wrote it? It looks like I meant to illustrate a thought about ‘dark clouds and dark skies’, reflecting our dark moods as in the ‘grapefruit’ haiku. I must have tried to say here that the same rain, which sometimes falls furiously as if ‘drum beating’ on us and on the roses is meant not only to ‘clear skies’ and our thoughts, but also to give life.
What about this rewrite:
rain on the roses
drum beating to clear skies
our shifting moods
meanings on walls (for One Shoot Sunday)
graffiti in the Lansing area, Michigan, photo by Chris Galford
1. squiggles
your words mere
squiggles on walls
if but smiles
on dry leaves–
when clouds take over the sun
the butterfly dies
2. waves
on the wall
waves splatter a froth
the sky sheds–
is it rain?
our hand carvings on sea air
but the mindless moon
3. sky
we sip dreams
no one knows of what–
were it earth
it would roll
drums beating down on our sky
to give up the stars
4. ripple
heat seeps off
tips of lanceolate
promises
disguised flames–
in the waters a ripple
once a breath twice life
5. blue fish
ocean lure–
we dig for stone fists
to ripple
the silence
a blue fish whispers to me
a broken flower
Copyright © by Alegria Imperial 2011
Five ‘haiku-induced’ shadorma, a Spanish sestet or 6-line poetic form in 3/5/3/3/7/5 syllables per line–my first attempt at it–in response to the Picture Photo Prompt Sunday (One Shoot Sunday) from photos of Chris Galford of graffit’d walls around the Lansing area in Michigan and posted at One Stop Poetry, the inimitable gathering place for poets and artists. Check us out!
the wait (TCR issue 51 for One Shot Wednesday)
on the window
the bird seed beveled
a choppy morning
where the soughing wind
mimics whispers
snagged among caricature
of trees
ruined by the rain
shredded under steps
leaves trapped in gutters—
thoughts flung on
rain puddles where the rain
drops as rings blurring
the sky
in the lilac bush
the ruckus of the sparrows
sinks into the sunset
in the brambles a spider web sags—
we wait for the darkness
to open up for the moon
Copyright (c) by Alegria Imperial 2011
Published at The Cortland Review Issue 51 May 2011
Posted for One Shot Wednesday at One Stop Poetry. Check out this site wher poets share their love for their art and nurture each other.
the rose bud/under a sky/full moon (random haiku and what else I am learning about haiku)
1.
rose bud
still tight in the rain–
the coming of summer
2.
under a sky
bent by a rainbow
we ease for home
3.
full moon
on an open cesspool–
the sun for me
full moon partially obscured by the Earth's atmosphere (21 Dec 1999 taken by austronauts aborad the Space Shuttle Discovery) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
I love how images work so well with haiku. And like paintings, they can be very compelling and draw out in their distance the deepest of emotions. Nothing should be overt in haiku. It must be hinted at, almost hidden or unnoticed.
For me, it could be something like a quiet reflection on the spit-notes of a waxwing or the epiphany of yes, a full moon on an open un-lidded cesspool. In the first, the notes for me feel like droplets of crystals that melt into a soft coating on my being, gifting me for a moment with the just-being-there-ness of a salmon berry blossom for a hummingbird; in the second, the moon sinks into my darkness– cesspool that I am in many ways of ‘pecadillos’, those daily pin pricks of rebellion from virtue and goodness–and turns on the light of the sun that is in me or what I believe to be my spirit, which at its core remains as powerful as the Sun from whom the moon draws its brightness.
Perhaps, I’m taking this too far but haiku works when it works for the poet–this is what I’m learning fast, though of course there are still the basic elements to go by. At the workshop of Michael Dylan Welch that I attended last Saturday right here in Vancouver in my neighborhood at the historic Joy Kogawa House, he emphasized a few key elements:
*not 5-7-5 syllables unless one is writing in Japanese
*must have a season (kigo) word (there are hundreds of them in a compilation by Japanese masters that differentiate for example mist and fog in spring and autumn have degrees of thinness, or even the moon is different in winter and autumn)
*must appeal to any or all of the 5 senses
*must be objective, meaning, not what is the emotion but what caused it
*precision (sharp focus), immediacy (of the moment not past or future both of which make it static), juxtaposition to make it ‘leap’ into a larger or higher perspective, which may be attained by contrast
*there’s a lot more than that, of course, and I’m still learning
Truly, reading haiku –and there’s thousands of them–and about the art may not be enough. Haiku has been for centuries some kind of a ‘group art’. It must be shared and worked at with others. For me, some kind of openness even humility are a must, a willingness to learn and be straightened out if what one has written seems vague or imprecise and the reader squints his eyes, knits his brows and says, ‘huh?’ instead of ‘ahhhh…’, clasps his hands and looks up to the heavens. Indeed, joining The Haiku Foundation that gave me access to Shiki Kukai, the Vancouver Haiku Group, and signing up for the NaHaiWriMo facebook site as well as submitting my haiku to and getting ‘acceptance’ and more often ‘declined’ mail from online haiku/tanka journals as well as other literary journals have been extremely rewarding.
Haiku’s most precise definition is ‘a short poem in one breath’. Ahhh…okay then, do these random haiku here make you say, ‘ahhhh’ or ‘huh’?
zenith at noon (for One Shoot Sunday)
Photo prompt by Fee Easton
rain combs the strands
of our adagios:
expanse of thoughts
farther than the ends of flights
wings aching for home
a sight among stars
we tread the waves
sink in whirlpools deeper
than the heart of the flower
a hummingbird chooses
lighter
than marrow-less limbs
skimming skies
bending the spheres
constellations pirouette
on mid-strains cresting to slope
to skid onto silken lilies
our bed of seasons
in our clasped hands
the sea regurgitates the sun
froth fizzes a tickle
on our kissing toes
the sea breeze binds horizons
our eyes delude a sunset
our dawns begin
the night
the zenith at noon
the depth of our dreaming
Copyright (c) by Alegria Imperial 2011
From a photo prompt by Fee Easton this poem is posted for One Shoot Sunday yet another challenge at One Stop Poetry, the inimitable gathering place of poets and artists, winner of the 2011 Shorty Awards for the Arts. Come join us. Share your love for your art. Be thrilled over what others say and what you discover of others’ works.
believing/faces i miss (haiku on NaHaiWriMo facebook wall)
believing
we’re walled in–
my goldfish and i
faces i miss–
some rain-washed stones
on neighbor’s wall
(re-worked haiku I posted on the still-on NaHaiWriMo facebook wall from a prompt by my friend, Melissa Allen: walls)
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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