stars (in a series of 3 haiku each also posted at the NaHaiWriMo site)

field of galalxies taken by Hubble ultra deep field courtesy of wikicommons

1.
pine strands
holding up the night sky—
how low can stars fall?

2.
moonless night—
my sky more punctured
than the last

3.
morning after
on campfire embers
remnants of stars

4.
sky patterns
on nibbled leaves
the Milky Way

5.
stars
digging into sand dunes—
our secrets

6.
forecast—
in and out of clouds
the constellations

7.
stars
through budding oaks—
he counts his lies

8.
paper moon
adrift among stars—
lost in the past

9.
Venus—
her icy sparkle
night and day

…from a prompt by Cara Hollman at the NaHaiWriMo facebook site. I love stars. As a child it must have been all I did when I got weary-eyed reading under a gas lamp or struggling through arithmetic assignments.

Both houses of my grandmothers I grew up in in northermost region of the Philippine archipelago had balconies with a rocking chair–one was a huge Viennese wicker in what must have been white, the other some kind of hard wood with carved head rest and arms where my mother spent rocking through the night, cradling my sister who wouldn’t sleep otherwise. I used to scan the night sky on the top of the stairs on those balconies but my first shooting star I caught not on any of those nights but once on vacation at Angeles Estates that I had posted here as a haibun.

Here in Vancouver on my evening walks–I love the fading light and the shadows–I hardly look at my steps but instead, follow trails in the sky; if it’s cloudy, I search for breaks or imagine ‘chattering stars and recalcitrant stars’ behind the clouds.

This series does say of my preoccupation with stars I hope. Perhaps, too, one more reason why my deep connection with the stars is this: my other name is Aurora, another name for Venus waning or the Morning Star.

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