New works at Under the Basho: early darkness, winter dusk, on the verge, pale sunset, word storm,

early darkness —

the dough yields its breast

to my hands

 

cattails, January 2015

Under the Basho my personal best 2015

 

winter dusk—

we scoot over 

for shadows

 

Under the Basho Stand-Alone hokku 2015

 

on the verge

of rocketing–

scent of silence

 

pale sunset 

the blue heron’s

midlife

 

word storm 

turning shadows

into a burden

 

Under the Basho modern haiku 2015

 

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My offering for International Haiku Poetry Day 2015 today

    mornings

             in the language of camellias…

                                     moonrise too soon

 

my flight

prompted by a unicorn–

blue mountains

 

                                                                peel by peel

                                                          the moon in my palm

                                                                    a heart

 

 

serenade

with a sleight of his hand

a lilac sky

 

unveiled

a cascade of apple blossoms

in the widow’s breast

 

first smile (haiga8 for Rick Daddario’s challenge at19 Planets Art Blog)

haiga 8 composed on Microsoft Publisher with my sister's first baby picture at 5 mos old

first smile nothing else

I remember that early morning light, which illumines the bedroom. It could have poured in through a window facing east where deep dark leaves of a star apple tree soaked most of it, leaving a young mango sprout pale in its struggle to grow. Or perhaps it was just uncared for. And why do I now blame the more luxuriant star apple? No one could pay much attention to the mango seedling then, since the birth of my sister and only sibling.

It could have been a Saturday morning. My mother could have been home that late and didn’t leave for school across the stream a block away, a post-deduction I’m making from the angle of the light. If it were a weekend, I must have been sleeping late. It couldn’t but be a Saturday or this picture wouldn’t have been taken by an uncle who also taught at the parish school. So why am I making a fuss this late?

Because I wish I could relate a more credible story as to how that first smile was caught. I remember my sister more as fretful. She cried when she felt sleepy or couldn’t sleep. She cried when she woke up and felt hot. When I carried her, I could not hold her facing me for long; I would have to make her face outward with one arm supporting her butt as in a seat, her legs dangling, and my other arm, bracing her close to me so she would not fall forward. She hardly smiled. She seemed to size up people as if already making opinions as they talked though she still couldn’t except to say, ‘Mama’. Which is why this smile for me sparkles as a gem.

I know that hand carved wooden bed. On it, I nuzzled on my mother’s side under a crook of her arm as deep as my memory dips. I watched my sister suckled from my mother’s breast, perhaps like I did, on this bed. I remember bumping my head on the headboard against carvings of huge blooms, hearts of gardenias in a swirl of leaves leaning away as if blown by their redolence. Lying on it felt like easing into silken strands, the hand woven rattan strips, which stretched and retracted with each un-recalled movement in dreams. I know that slightly creased sheet, too, which is actually a native heavy woven cotton blanket I had dived into as a child myself. It must have been really a Saturday morning because I see no pillows, which my grandmother would have gathered to put out under the sun to disinfect and deodorize.

The story I recall of this morning has to do with impulses. An uncle who lived on the other corner of our street, apparently just happened to drop by with his camera. He just suddenly wanted to take a picture of my 5-month old sister. My sister just then was learning to turn on her side. That morning, she happened to do a full turn to lie on her belly. She just happened to smile. Or maybe I was there to clown around when my uncle clicked his Kodak Field camera. But the truth is, I remember nothing else but this first smile.

Fifty four years gape between that morning and me today. I am now an elderly woman hankering for details I missed. But then again because I have none except this moment caught, I can spin webs around it to catch any morning light, and perhaps one like that Saturday morning.

nightmare (for One Shoot Sunday)

Picture prompt by Rosie Hardy

the last drop of turpentine
stains the moon on the landscape
she conjured

out of yarn that wobbled
like disembodied Adam’s apple
talking to her of a man

she pulled a meadow
where cows wear earrings
and metal buckled boots

they stomp on blue irises
eat white poppies and sneezing
blow balloons from their noses

she draws a woman in a shed
whittling an arrow for a son, but
where’s the boy

a blond head and arms like sticks
legs broken in angles appears
astride on a cow

the moon comes rising
mid spring among the grumbling oaks
their skin brittle as glass crack

the wind is cruel in the meadow
it sweeps in gales and shifts corners
unexpected

she runs out of turpentine
as the white mice appear in between
the boy and a grinning calf

the spaces she overlooked
now scurrying as swift as the wind
she wallops a blob of blue

as if the sky does not cause
clouds that mutate into white mice
the last of the turpentine drips

to the woman’s lap
where is the man and son ask
the elder berries

the woman leaps to dance
the dance of the moon when crazed
by the giggling stars

not stars but tickling
white mice has the woman stoned
after the dance to shake

her nightmare off
she doesn’t waken even as the man wills
to turn himself into a bearded mouse

the painting clears out
in the dream the woman in the shed
becomes a petulant woman wearing

white breasts and the man-mouse
has multiplied on her

Posted for One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry from a prompt by Rosie Hardy. This inimitable site for poets and artists starts the first Sunday of its second year, winning a Shorty Award for the Arts in its first year. Check out what made it win!

I wish to thank Adam, Chris G, Brian, Pete and Claudia again for having done a wonderful job. NO word is ever enough for what I feel I’ve gained from OSP.

I was once her (for one Shot Wednesday)

who sits on the couch in the music room
lost in autumn hair, violins on a CD player
wafting smiles not hers, smiles of a piquant woman
her lover lost on the river walk that evening
briar roses crumbled on their steps shredded
foliage cushioned.

She sits on vacant clouds, eyes
hinting wakefulness on pools
the sun once mirrored
then drowned. The geese left no sign
that evening of the walk not even a note
to hold up to a sun sinking on the barge:
logs swayed on the water, old men rasped
scraping brawns the tide whittled,

bumping to the rhythm. She hears
her lover hum the tune,
a river whistling in the runes, flowing
infinitely like words in
a vow: in this and that state
no breath in between
but death. Not geese but iron flies
buzzing into her heart shattered

the pool that afternoon, shards of water
blinding her her lover saying good-bye, to fly
on blades that whirl not wings that beat
on air, to return an angel, breast beribboned
to preen to count those fallen
from his fingers.
She peers through her cloud this afternoon:
a river ebbing at her feet, touching

her wiggling toes, she giggles over
silly notes as violins rise, twirling
allegro on the river bank where she once sat
mourning over geese that afternoon
her lover returned a name
in a note unsigned, the lover

who once was mine.

Posted for One Shot Wednesday at One Stop Poetry, the gathering place of poets and artists yet unmatched in calibre and talent. I’m a follower here. Do check us out!

Abrazos (for One Shot Wednesday)

If your lips open
as if in awe, and purse
for a light trill, if a tiny whisper
escapes through your smile, a
soft hiss as you breathe
you have said,
Abrazos.

Say it again
and feel your
breast caving in
as your arms curve
like an open arc, an arc
the size of your aching.

Then when your palms
clasp, feel how your heart
gasps, as it curls
in hers.

first published in http://www.poeticdiversity.org, April 2008

Posted for One Shot Wednesday at One Stop Poetry, a community of poets and artists community whose love for what they do sustains their being together.