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)
rehearsal break (haiku on dance at NaHaiWriMo)
sea otters holding hands by Joe Robertson, Austin, TX courtesy of wikicommons
rehearsal break
catching some sea breeze
in dreams
posted for NaHaiWrimo under ‘dance’ prompt by Carlos Colon
doves/winter dawn/eyes (haiku on relationships at NaHaiWriMo)
Inca doves nesting courtesy of wikicommons
1.
cooing
we slip past
the brambles
3.
winter dawn
grayer than her tresses
on his chest
3.
eyes
locked in adoration
my cat and i
Nov 25th prompt by Carlos Colon at the still ongoing National Haiku Writing Month (NaHaWriMo facebook site) with slight editing of #1.
rejection notes (sharing a personal essay with Sanjukta)
I’d like to share this personal essay I once wrote after receiving yet another rejection note; more had come and I expect nine out of ten submissions will keep coming. You would understand why it’s melodramatic. But that feeling has not swept me over since. When I do receive one these days, I simply put away the poem, haiku or tanka, rewrite and submit to another editor. A few of these have been accepted and published. Here’s the essay:
Why must rejection wring the mind so?
These words marching onto this blank screen leaked off a bottle of emotions I had dammed. It’s been a week ago since a rejection note sneaked into my inbox—a single line in bold letters; it’s not the first, but the latest of ten I have received so far. Reading the note then, I felt sand in my eyes, pain that brings on tears. First, they stung and then creeping down my cheeks, they felt cold as a blade. I could be bleeding, I thought, but not from an invisible cut on my cheeks–it must be in my shattered heart.
Why must words of rejection wring the mind so? I had long struggled to understand. No matter how cavalier I talk of my writing, rejection feels like death for me at times. It must be during those times when I wrote too hard and too long so much so that an illusion of perfection shrouded me and darkened that fragile cave—my heart—from which I always imagine I write.
From what do words get birthed anyway? This has always been a mystery to me akin to my search for God. But this I believe in, the universe came to be out of nothing because God so decreed it with words.
I am a being out of nothing. Hence, my words leap onto a screen from the void. Why then must rejection affect me so? I and what words I string together as soon as they slip into some kind of form should turn into objects like asteroids, for one, flinging through the universe. I, who worked on it and that which they have birthed into, should no longer bear any of me.
And yet, complex as is my tiny mind, it also bloats with greed and feels as if words it has put into shape become the universe. How dare then, does anyone reject them?
But in the end, I am grateful for each rejection; it shoves me back into place. The eye does not see the self in whole, only in parts; rejection really hurts only in part. As in every object in the universe, other parts of me that have been spared soon take over and begin to birth again.
reggae (haibun)
So, why reggae when I could or must dwell on variations of winter? Even the sun has withdrawn to cuddle up with hibernating thoughts and fur-thickened limbs. It’s cold and damp and gray in my city everyday. Which is why perhaps, this morning I woke up with the sound of reggae on a basin in my mind, the kind you hear on Times Square in New York from the subway station on 42nd and Broadway to the corners of that triangle where Tickits booths stand.
reggae–
the sun dripping
on his basin
Always, a robust sun streams no end on the basin from which reggae artists coax notes to rise like it were a constant season. But we don’t return after the summer or late spring.
catching a breath
his notes leave for the moon–
reggae
Or under a November sky, without the sun and the reggae artist, we would ourselves be lamenting.
reggae the sun we can’t find
winter trees (haiga)
winter trees
waiting on the silence
our breaths
(with my snap shot of Grouse Mountain, Vancouver from the lift last spring)
sea foam (haiku)
sea foam
remnants of our resistance
drowning on sand
November sky haiga (Manhattan skyline from the Hudson at Riverbank State Park)
November sky
we fling our shadows
among clouds
haiku: alegria imperial
photo: eleanor angeles
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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