sea froth (my 340th post)

scraping
bottom to reach sky high
sea froth

It’s my 340th post! I never thought I’d get this far. But my fascination with poetry, especially haiku and other forms of Japanese poetry, has since turned into something akin to obsession, or it is already. None of my efforts to learn more and strive for better written lines would be for nothing without you, dear friends, followers and readers. If words do not fall on ground and felt, these turn into dust. But you’ve breathed half of the life I did to them. Thank you all!

morning tide/seashore/high tide (my last post at NaHaiWriMo for now)

a.*
morning tide—
still
the heaving waves

b.
seashore–
washed off burdens
lapping at our feet

c.
billows and clouds
fading as dreams—
high tide

NaHaiWriMo prompt: seaside, seashore 07/16/2011
*the only one I posted on the site

I’m taking a breather from writing haiku on the NaHaiWriMo FB site to rethink on where I am and where I’m going with this genre. My writing a haiku has been taking me longer and longer, more tedious because the more I’m learning about what makes a good one, the more conscious I am of each word I put down. I feel that this process is taking a toll on the intuitive way I write poetry as most of the lines I write do seemingly write themselves out in one breath. Not so, with haiku that I want to work; yes, it comes easy when I’m ‘haiku-ing’ for myself or in this blog but when I begin to be conscious of ‘judging eyes’, I falter and fail and I write what for me and often I’m not wrong, a ‘lame’ or ‘yikes’ haiku.

I guess I should try to learn more, read more from Basho who lured me into the art in 2005 when I found a collection of his haiku, honestly the first I ever read having been schooled in continental literature, at the Enoch Pratt Library main library in Baltimore. Perhaps, I should reflect more on how his haiku often turn out as a meditation like in the famous ‘old pond’ where the frog’s splash fractures the silence to remind him that in the stillness of a pond, there is sound, there is life that brings him back from the ether to the frog.

But not wanting to lose my haiku-writing cells, I’m still writing with the prompts privately and continuing with my haibun memoir, some of which or excerpts of which I’ll post here once in a while.

renegade (for One Shoot Sunday)

Photo prompt by Rosa Frei

the wind ceases soughing
on its own tracks—
a sputtering light sinks
in the dunes burrowing into dark
secrets the sun furrowed
in its grief
he knows

two dromedaries
behind him cast swaying shadows
dancing to ulululations in the vastness
his droning crazes the stars
sand grit hazed—
he craves for endearments

he stumbles on his own fears
the head stone fractures his seeing
night glows on the foot stone
his own finality writ
he gathers his being in his jalabiyya the wind
left flapping

the desert looms around him—
an open wound of cryptic rhythms—
he scrapes his restless darkness
off imprints on the sand
a phantom hisses death
on his mute shababa he staggers on

another wind billows in the desert
another sky arcs over remains
of the sun simmering
on tarnished sand
he looks up
to infinity funneled
in the black and white
of his eyes

the beaten gold of the desert
sizzles out

Copyright (c) by Alegria Imperial

Free verse composed from a photo prompt by Rosa Frei for One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry, a gathering of poets and artists sharing their talents, nurturing each other. Check us out. Bettery yet, come join us.

tsunami (a haibun draft)

What else but a surreal image? That’s how sizes and dimensions gape at us when Nature takes on our own nature of maniacal rage. An earthquake and a tsunami, for example, when men are turned into nothing but grit and as equally irritating to be winnowed out–if only Nature were like our eyes and hands that miss the tears along with the grit and spare some in prayer.

But sizes do not end where our span points midair or our eyes on walls of horizons. Dimensions spawn spaces blank beyond our knowing. What births in such depths and heights? Men have invented words to describe their fear. They brew these in inner cauldrons but fail to empty them out onto sand.

The steam scalds them at times, the overboil sometimes burns them. But dimensions distract them as they control what’s unseen, what heals, what’s scarred and soothed with words.

Beware do not build on an earthquake fault. As if the fissures may not crack elswhere. Leave the lush volcanic soil. As if men’s hankering for paradise can be tamped down. Live each day as if night were true death. As if, as if deafness can resist the moon’s whispers. Sizes and dimensions on sand only children can fathom turn out to be the truest picture. But even with a heart like a child’s men loses in his tangled thoughts a vision of sizes and dimensions, hence,

towers of sand
suspending stars and sky–
then come billows

ILUKO HAIKU

How much can I possibly give my own self a jornal for this priceless rediscovery of the dialect–one of 87 but among the five major dialects in the Philippines–I was born with it but lost from lack of usage when I was in my teens? Nobody can imagine my endless exhilaration everytime a poem leaps off my breast: the sound of each word, the image it conjures, the spirit around which an old or new world unravels are beyond … words. It’s priceless! If you could, this time, would you please pay me a jornal for it?

 1.

batbato inta
kapanagan
sabsabong ti sardam

stones
on the riverbank
dawn flowers 

2.

daluyon iti
tengga’t aldaw
arasaas mo

billows
at high tide
your whispers 

3.

bulan nga
agpadaya
nagpakada kadi?

setting moon
in the east
did you say goodbye? 

4.

inururot
a pagay
tedted ti lulua

pulled strands
of rice grain
tear drops

5. 

dagiti bulbulong
nga agtataray
lenned diay laud

rustle
of leaves
sun set

Alegria Imperial at LYNX XXIV 1 February 2009 /also PoemShape/and bilingual pen/and iluko.com