I’ve been browsing through my files and found this treasure that I have forgotten, buried as it is in my daily-writing years. I’ve slowed down a bit, especially on haiku, feeling like I’m skidding into a meltdown. I seem more productive with my mainstream/innovative/contemporary poems more accepted by only a couple of editors these days. But I’m amazed no end when I find my old works especially when it has been picked up and reviewed as Kathy Uyen Nguyen did to my haiku and haibun at her blog Origami Lotus Stone seven years ago. And my heart sinks…Thank you again, so much Kathy!
August Blog Bash, Day 22 – Alegria Imperial @gwhisp
Welcome to the Debut of the August Blog Bash 2012!
I am very much excited and honored to be hosting this new feature series… and it is a great way to end the summer! This Blog Bash is an impressive talent showcase of poets, artists, and writers/authors from all walks of life. For each day of this month, one individual will be featured here on this blog, at Origami Lotus Stones, my Twitter (hashtag will be #augblogbash), my Facebook community page, and on my blog page on Writing Our Way Home. Please be patient while I post on all platforms.
**Please note that all authors/artists have given me permission to post their work on the following platforms/sites I have just mentioned. Please do not plagiarize, modify, reproduce, or distribute any work without permission from the original authors/artists. Thank you!** If you are interested in participating in this Blog Bash, feel free to
check out the details here.
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Today’s Feature: Alegria Imperial 
This gorgeous haiku presents a new perspective of church bells tolling with words in minimalistic form. Through this haiku, the reader can feel the heartbeat of every bell toll as well as his/her own heart beating along with the bells themselves. I also love the fact that this haiku leaves a subtle touch of the “just enough” sensation for the reader to put his/her imagination into the haiku itself. For instance, perhaps it’s a pair of newlyweds who’s just swapped vows. However, notice that these are “angelus bells.” Imperial was very precise with this choice of words. It denotes something worthy of praise–like an angelic praise that is continuous and prolonged (“pealing”), which really does turn one’s pulse up a notch! I also like the word play here too. “Pealing” should not be confused with “peeling.” If the angelus bells are “peeling / in heartbeats,” I would be perhaps thinking about peeling off flower petals such as bell flowers or bleeding hearts (and maybe sticking a flower behind my ear), which would make a wonderful transition between bells and flowers!
I am very excited to say that this is the first haibun presented through this August Blog Bash series! This haibun presents a powerful experience of just simply paying attention to what’s around you and just “being there” in the moment. There are so many lovely words and phrases here such as “the way the leaves sway and retract” and “the constancy of flowers.” The stream-of-consciousness style in this haibun is steady and soothing like the river itself. The delightful thing is that you realize that everything ends in the river when the haibun ended with a “river” haiku. Both prose and haiku complement one another well. I love how the prose ended with a floating “when,” which leads cleverly into “shifting tides” (wonderful syntax here), so that there seem to be no break (in the flow) between prose or haiku, even though visually, the reader can see the prose and the haiku separately on the page. This haibun is very lyrical and meditative in composition and tone. Gorgeous work, Alegria! Thank you so much for sharing and being one of the contributors! And many, many thanks for your patience and understanding with what I’m going through now. (NB: Text arrangement on MS PowerPoint by Kathy Uyen Nguyen. Please note that text/graphics will be in this format.)
To check out more of Alegria’s work, you can click on the following link(s): Jornales (blog) Filipineses (blog) @gwhisp(Twitter) Please do promote this new feature on Facebook, Twitter, etc.! Thanks so much for all the support! And look, my blog now has buttons (see below) to make your life easier! Come back tomorrow for a new artist/author feature!
being there
…it is the rhythm that’s constant it seems and not the stillness—the way the wind pulls and withdraws and the way the leaves sway and retract or how the clouds gather into masses and then dissipate into air or is it merely the eye that misses the jagged movements and edges and catches merely that moment when the rhythm shows and reassures us as in the constancy of flowers even as petals begin to brown and curl in the edges and fall, stripping the branches of their name because all we recall is their being there as in moments we have flowed into still flow into like on our early morning walks when
shifting tides–
the river unloading burdens
for us to decode
LYNX XXVII:I February 2012
September 1, 2019
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Had been trying to put them all together and finally succeeded, I think. Here they are before I lose them…happy to share!
grey sky
the gull’s plaintive cries
fade into a wave
Fourth Place
Sea to Sky Haiku Canada Weekend contest May 17-19, 2019, Vancouver BC
autumn rain
the river carries
the sky
2ndPlace
European Quarterly Kukai, Autumn 2017
dream catcher
the shifting colours
of dawn
3rdplace, European Haiku Kukai #12 Winter 2015
first tea with her—
cherry blossoms cloud
the skylight
Vancouver Sakura Award
2014 Vancouver Cherry Blossoms Festival Haiku Invitational
our breaths
suspended between skies—
monarch butterfly
honourable mention
2013 Diogen Autumn Contest
butterfly
a whispered breeze
to the bamboo
12th International kukai ‘butterfly’ 115 haijin, 115 haiku, 27 countries
9th place (tie)
first dawn alone–
the widow eats his half
of the orange
Per Diem Daily Haiku
“Light and Dark”, December 2014
Per Diem Archiveon the Haiku Foundation Website, and the Haiku App.
First Place, free format category, Shiku kukai Sept 2013
pancake steam—
the thin mist on mornings
in a wicker swing
Zatsuei, Haiku of Merit
World Haiku Review March 2013
mixing bowls—
the shallow echoes
of bells
4th place 10th International Kukai
January 2013
twilight rain
the blue heron mid-lake
somehow smaller
Commended, Traditional haiku
The Haiku Foundation’s 2012 Haiku Now Contest
Under the Basho 2013
winter solstice
the widow tightens
her braids
First Place, kigo* category
December 2012 Shiki* kukai (yava)
spring song
how it draws the heart
to reflection
Alegria Imperial, Vancouver, BC, Canada
3rdPlace, 1stBlossom Rain haiku My Photo Challenge, May 2012
stretching its neck
as if to measure our sky
turtle
Editor’s choice, Sketchbook ‘pond life’ kukai, March-April 2012
Commentary:
Bernard Geitske
“the temptation to philosophize or explore one’s being is very strong”
somehow
our shrinking shadows touch—
harvest moon
haiku bandit society
September 2011 Dottie Dot Awards
words
we’ve left unsaid–
Indian summer
First Place, kigo category
July 2011 Shiki kukai
cherry blossoms
shedding petals at dusk—
moths in flight
Honorable Mention
2007 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival
Haiku Invitational and first published haiku
August 31, 2019
Posted by alee9 |
awards, haiku, poetry |
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muffled wildness a winnowing sky
coughing out the sphere rogue wind
ashen dust between fingers palm ribs
outlines against the rain bones inside out
eggshell stillness un-swept sun-shreds
conical jaws vs marbles in a skull graveyard issues
empty eyes glued to a rootless ‘O’
dangling words noone follows swollen whiteness
Bones 17 July 15, 2019 (journal of contemporary haiku)
July 31, 2019
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if eye-to-eye with a salamander
talk Heidegger or
drop down flat on your belly
hiss if you can
wait for existential footnotes
be sure to tiptoe
what if a rat
spews out philosophy
like the state of consciousness
in a walnut
the brain you ask
frog guffaws a croak
in fact, a song
confusing reality with logos
frog’s right in that
easier to breathe out pretense
than tug your tie clear your throat
of animus
and begin on a ribbibit
otata July 2019
July 31, 2019
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The first poem (versified haibun) to which I wrote a sequel posted earlier below this: also published at otata, January 2018, of which the editor said, “a masterwork, a splendid piece”. Verses in parenthesis read as haiku…
post-perspectives on (that night)
Alegria Imperial
1.
been told where midnight birthed the Child, a goat bleated and a lamb stared away
to count adorers, i was told, beyond three said to be kings,
in fact, a throng—could they have been cloned?
no heralds really and only the soundless rise and fall
of wondering eyes moved
on the one hand
stars (might have) abandoned
the stable for hillocks
2.
but said of the gifts laid down on hay, gold singeing the silence for one,
incense and myrrh rising as acrid mist—all unfit for dancing around the manger—
no eye winced, not the mother’s veiled though lit like a crescent moon
or the father’s side-glance, bent and weighed down, it had seemed,
braced by a cane possibly de-limbed from a comet-burst,
so i caught from word that came around
silenced (no trace)
boom of horns
3.
deeper into that night, the telling somehow tangles—a wild moon, i was told,
that the star outshone, hence, grown bereft flailed, and in shreds
fell on shepherds the heralds missed, as the camels drunk on light crossed over
from a universe of desert breasts coming to, centuries since,
a seething patchwork of wheeled-what nots, and men—the narrator opined—
pining to be kings scissor-ed streets, where spires of gothic cathedrals taunt the skies,
finding in a huddle of felled pines,
and plastic star-garlands,
their own stable-born
morning ruckus
(balled-up) winds hang
on sand-rimmed clouds
4.
but said of the adoration:
a stream of footfalls—human-forms spiffed up
in business suits and woolen coats,
the unclean eaten by greed, the twisted of bone,
the mummied-up with melting flesh,
the widow but her husband’s ghost,
though not a whiff of malodorous wounds—
inundated the aisle to the crèche as brass handles
of candelabras shed their sheen, and soon, on a parade of hands
a litany of rants rumbled like bamboo clappers,
breaths rising as
petulant wing shapes (or shapeless)
fog the rose windows
5.
one story teller, un-glued, swears he did catch
the plaster of Paris baby’s lids flutter, as lambs peered
at the adorers, and the child’s mother blowing praises into her infant’s
folded ears, while the father leaned back, perhaps deciphering a dream, while
late-coming adorers crept in, rustling
with agonies reprised over and over in a rhythmic ejaculation
of supplication for mercies, so the story
rambles on
corner knot (finger-frayed)
the pain of denial
leaves a wound
6.
this renegade tells
how he, too, waded
his way in, palms damp
from doubt, teary from wafts of incense,
lisping as he counted nights lost on fingers,
confounded by shifting
animal sounds,
and the
leaps and
swirls of
limbs
where
on a cross (hung from a concrete sky)
the midnight Star
https://otatablog.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/otata-feb-2018.pdf
December 2, 2018
Posted by alee9 |
poetry, reflection, versified haibun | adoration, birthed, camels, Cross, litany, midnight, rose windows, stable |
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