How I tackled Alan Summers’ prompts at NaHaiWriMo last May
Here’s a week of responses to Alan Summers’ prompts at the NaHaiWriMo (National Haiku Writing MOnth, which Michael Dylan Welch created at Facebook three years ago). YES, definitely, a daily challenge to write haiku has cranked up my mind or better yet, like a fit body, oiled it to resiliency. Writing with a group on cyberspace without the politics of bodily presence and its complications of commitments, has also made me fearless about risking my inadequacies–this turned out to be the secret to finding out who I am as a haiku poet as my lines do reveal. But who this is, until now, I can’t put it in a word…perhaps you can! Here then for you to enjoy, I hope.
#05/07/13 (green/gold/gone )
lunar eclipse—
his eyes on her frayed
jeans front
shattered eye what’s left of her mirror
gold leaf saint—
his indifferent stare
#05/06/13 (found as implied)
petal gust–
the street flutist’s
scrambled notes
under her hat…
the missing stubbles
tunnel spigot …the broken loo
fan tail on second thought
pointed fingers his guilt in black nails
#05/05/13 (echo)
weaving
through a cross stitch
of their argument…
her echo
spring echo–
the baby confronts
a Buddha
echo–
he smiles to his own smile
his other smile
#05/04/13 (den)
behind
the den mother’s back…
murmuring cubs
den of iniquity he finds his own sky
reeking of prey the fox’s den
#05/03/13 (curve)
the curve in her thighs wind chart
Lothario–
the river curves
out by rote
curved furrows a worried moon
05/02/13 (blue)
blue dawn…
the rain’s last phrase
on a glass pane
05/01/13 (asperity)
next I look…
the staccato scratching
of his rake
tea rings in my cup the grumbling darkness
on gravel
a day moon’s
sniffle
“tilted sky” haiga at NTFG
Notes from the Gean December 2012
My 2012-13 published haiku…I hope you like them!
selected published haiku (international haiku journals)
her stiff lip
breaks into a smile
clown for hire
***
swinging
on hooped earrings
bag lady’s air
***
weaving in and out
of whole conversations
his Pinocchio nose
LYNX June 2013
xxx
insomnia—
a restless dream
stalks the moon
moongarlic ezine 1:1, May 2013
xxx
moss bed
a moonbeam sits
on my lap
A Hundred Gourds May 2013
xxx
bilingual haiku
(Iluko)
panagawid–
nakabaklay kaniak ti napilay
nga Apo Init
(English)
homebound–
perched on my shoulder
a lame sun
(Iluko)
panaglunag ti niebe–
agririn dagiti billit
gapu ken Apo init
(English)
thaw–
sun sparks a row
among the wrens
(Iluko)
sabsabong ti sardam
agararudoken kas mabain
ti duduogan a bulan
(English)
dawn flowers—
creeping away as if shy
the old moon
(Iluko)
ranitrit dagiti kawayn
iti baet ti danarudor didaya–
arko ti kanta dagiti bulilising
(English)
bamboo creaks
between a roaring in the east–
an arc of bird song
kernels 1:1 April 2013
xxx
between us
a pie cut
of infinities
Notes from the Gean, April 2013
xxx
still pond—
not a hole in the sky
I swallowed
Notes from the Gean, March 2013
xxx
turtle pond
a girl shares unshelled
peanuts
One of seven in a four-week run of 28 as contributing poet at DailyHaiku’s Cycle 14
October to March, 2013
xxx
tomorrow still a house of knives
Bones 1:1 December 2012
xxx
overcast
an orange scarf flails
on the clothesline
Multiverses 1:1 June 2012
xxx
figuring out
wintry patterns
fretwork sky
Daily Haiku Selection Mainichi, Japan
Feb. 20, 2012
WITH AN OPEN MIND (/MAP)
What a vivid sensory experience this column item by Stella Pierides wrote in Note from the Gean’s ‘haikumatters’!! It rumbled through my mind, exciting me to think indeed what map do I have? And here it is: “Oh, the map I use? It’s uncharted and unnamed. It’s wild woods and a black forest. There are lakes and pools but also bogs, smokey in the deep. Unless ‘I find a flower I can name’, it’s hard even for me to find my way back. Birds sing and talk but mostly unseen except the owl. Sometimes, he reveals their name. I’ve taken notes but forget about them the moment I walk in. The map is always new, uncharted and unnamed. I know it’s not good but maybe the owl will help someday somehow.”
Haiku favorites of mine and of other poets from the 2013 NaHaiWriMo month
Dear followers and readers,
I’d like to apologize for a ‘long absence’ here. I could give you a thousand reasons but none would make up for the time that had flown by. In that flow, however, I had gathered more skies, more suns rising and setting, stars, fallen petals and laughing fishes, herons and gulls and countless sighs. And in them or because of such harvest, my haiku, tanka, haibun, and haiga have taken wing onto wind paths I couldn’t have imagined. Most of all, perhaps because I persisted, my haiku writing has grown stronger limbs with daily prompts at NaHaiWriMo (NHWM). Herewith then, like a ‘take home’ gift from a long trip are haiku by me and my choices by other poets during last year’s NHWM anniversary when founder, Michael Dylan Welch gives the daily prompt. He made us chose favorites from ours and those of other poets–these are mine, of which I hope yours, too. Thanks so much for being with me all these years and for those who simply stumbled into here, welcome!
Alegria
#04/02/13 (spice)
First off, I’d like to thank you, Michael, for NaHaiWriMo, and for this year’s month, your concrete prompts that are so everyday, it was a challenge yet a joy to see them with a new eye. Second, I’d like to say , “Many thanks, Pamela and Carole for choosing one each of my haiku for your favorite!!” Third, I wish to thank the many poets, a lot of them I’ve written with a haiku daily here (except for a few weeks that I couldn’t) for the past three years, flourishing in our community. Such joy to find not just a few of yours that resonate, nay, sun-splash on my way everyday. I’ve learned so much about and from you.
And now because I’m always overwhelmed and overjoyed, I cannot limit my choices to just one, of course, except for mine. But I have gathered those of others as if they were mine, too! Indeed, as in one of the resources you posted here, Michael, haiku binds because we open up ourselves to and for its lines. What greater bind is there than one that’s straight from one’s heart (spirit) and into another’s and into one’s own from another’s.
A favorite from mine though there’s about a dozen in my shortlist!
cardamom
in curry rice, a past
she cracks open
Of others and like the process for mine, dozens in my shortlist!
orange blossom –
lifting her burqa
just enough
Eider Green
sleepless . .
the path from my bed
to the Pleiades
Sandi Pray
the secret door
to grandpa’s room
in grandma’s closet
wild roses
Stevie Strang
garage sale
my past fills
a stranger’s car
Michele Harvey
closet
my rebellion taped inside
a cardboard box
Scott Abeles
father’s garage
the painted outline
of a missing tool
Bret Mars
a red mark
on her test paper . . .
Indian summer
Michael Dylan Welch
blue
as her corsage
wallflower
Haiku Elvis—Carlos Colon
riverbed…
the sound of moonbeams,
playing rocks
Ted van Zutphen
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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