flaring petals (haiga link)
I can’t figure out how to add the visual (media) here, and so, please click on the link to view the haiga. Sorry!
flaring petals
breath within breath
their dawn
nagging rain & wave lashings in THF’s Per Diem February feature
My two haiku in The Haiku Foundation’s ‘Haiku in the World’ February feature on the Philippines:
nagging rain
on the moon’s face…
a baby’s whimper
The Haiku Foundation Per Diem, February 9, 2015
‘Haiku in the World’ February feature: The Philippines
Per Diem Archive on The Haiku Foundation Website, and the Haiku App
wave lashings—
with every breath
the shore yields
The Haiku Foundation Per Diem, February 1, 2015
‘Haiku in the World’ February feature: The Philippines
Per Diem Archive on The Haiku Foundation Website, and the Haiku App
As you could surmise, both haiku rise from images of natural disasters which had wrought much havoc and suffering in the Philippines these recent years. In the distance, and the years I have lived in Canada, every face in each calamity transports me back home with the same intensity as if I were there and the same emotions and fears rise again as implied in these two haiku.
meanings on walls (for One Shoot Sunday)
graffiti in the Lansing area, Michigan, photo by Chris Galford
1. squiggles
your words mere
squiggles on walls
if but smiles
on dry leaves–
when clouds take over the sun
the butterfly dies
2. waves
on the wall
waves splatter a froth
the sky sheds–
is it rain?
our hand carvings on sea air
but the mindless moon
3. sky
we sip dreams
no one knows of what–
were it earth
it would roll
drums beating down on our sky
to give up the stars
4. ripple
heat seeps off
tips of lanceolate
promises
disguised flames–
in the waters a ripple
once a breath twice life
5. blue fish
ocean lure–
we dig for stone fists
to ripple
the silence
a blue fish whispers to me
a broken flower
Copyright © by Alegria Imperial 2011
Five ‘haiku-induced’ shadorma, a Spanish sestet or 6-line poetic form in 3/5/3/3/7/5 syllables per line–my first attempt at it–in response to the Picture Photo Prompt Sunday (One Shoot Sunday) from photos of Chris Galford of graffit’d walls around the Lansing area in Michigan and posted at One Stop Poetry, the inimitable gathering place for poets and artists. Check us out!
enraged (for One Shoot Sunday)
Darth Vader by Jack AZ
we go on, wagging
forefingers at skies,
resenting seasons
that fall on us in clumps
of such rhythmic
regularity we just can’t
play our black violins
raging against or else
against the grind
we feel a heartless hand
its fingers like iron
claws so tight in grip we find
our waggling a senseless
attempt at being freed—if
but one beat one note
one breath that does not
fall in rhythmic rhyme
skids from fingers that slide
from point to point to
point, interminable
points, infinitesimal bits,
that had so imprisoned us
raging—
one breath that stops and
we can’t, we won’t find out
we haven’t moved away
from seasons we resented,
music we played, beats
we raged against
Posted for One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry from a photo prompt titled, “Darth Vader” by Jack AZ. Join us, a community of poets and artists who share the art they so love and nurture reach other.
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.
Be Sharp Or Else (for One Shoot Sunday)
litter on the beach—
fleeting clicks of feet,
timed echoes of Coney Island
soughing songs, root-less
throbs and beats
that pump the river flow within or
flints your thoughts
turn into, darting from
the breeze cavorting
on your tulle train
and into litter bins—
snag, entangle, entrap.
Be sharp watching:
your thoughts ginger-dancing
behind your parasol
must free your mind of weight
or else crushing any or all
essences that inflame your thoughts
turn into spits and sparks
you want extracted but
cannot so they rend your being
even if within you geysers
rush and pool in balance—the circus
has not started on the beach
they wait like you do–
the waiting could split you into
yawning jagged edges
for nothing. Be sharp: or else
litter turned sour heads wheeze from
and into spots you believe hidden, pushed
into crevices unknown to you, even
you, these cankered
wounds smoothed
over, but bleeding still
under skin could swell deluding you into
desires no calming breath
could stay these red bogs
within you heaving in wait for just
a drop, a sip,
a taste of pleasure.
Be sharp watching.
Or else, absent head-turns
throbbing temples blind you
to points in the fair—pennants flying:
when does the Ferris wheel stop
spinning? The roller coaster
wheezes by, the hotdogs
at Nathan’s grilling.
Be sharp
or else unseeing, you
slip into some thought
some litter you had tossed
that is you.
Posted for One Shoot Sunday from a photo of the mermaid parade in Coney Island by Danielle Kelly. Join other poets at One Stop Poetry blog who write verses for love, read those of others, leave a word of encouragement and/or insight with the same love and respect. Post your piece on your blog and sign up in the Mr. Linky list.
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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jornales 