some of my spring haiku with French translation by Serge Tome@tempslibres.org
gray spring dawn-
the shiver of daffodils
in my bones
aube grise de printemps –
le frisson des jonquilles
dans mes os
this cold-
Sakura cherry blossoms
on my window
ce froid –
fleurs de cerisiers Sakura
à ma fenêtre
this sunless spring day
chickadees chatter on-
my indecisions
ce jour de printemps sans soleil
les mésanges discutent –
mes indécisions
watching rain
drum beat on window pane–
the deaf cat
il regarde la pluie
tambouriner sur la vitre —
le chat sourd
spring fever–
shoots among the lilies
she can’t name
fièvre de printemps —
des pousses parmi les lys
qu’elle ne peux nommer
tempslibres.org
Night Scents: the truth about roses (for One Shot Wednesday)
Evening has fallen, tarnishing all translucence. Daffodils, for one, sprayed like comet behind a picket fence, are now turned-down copper bells. Magnolias, that crowd of plump cheeks on Warren Avenue, now doze on bruised faces.
Only dogwoods on front lawns seem to take evening fall with grace. Their crown, a dull mantle in daylight, has turned into iridescent lace while on the ground ivy has thickened, breathing like a ghost.
Not colors but scents have taken over life in the dying day. But nothing like vapors that seem solid like steam or fog or mist, just weightless molecules spinning in the air.
‘Fragrant’ seems paltry if it were to mean the scent of violets blindly met along a cypress hedge on Montgomery St.—a bouquet part spicy part sweet like a potion for a faint spirit. ‘Perfumed’ weighs gaudily on jasmine for its scent from a terrace on Battery St. descends as faint as a memory—fleeting like all moments that come back to haunt.
.
The nose, is it? Or perhaps the heart leads the nose to track down the scent of roses. Some flourish in unlikely spots; they trap the heart in a patch back of a kitchen on Riverside, for instance. Here, rose bushes wear open faces. No secret chambers there.
Even in the evening, rose blooms thrust up as if to sing—but not to sing, perhaps more to sigh. Listen then and breathe for in opening their lips, their scent also escapes. Note that only in the evening this truth about roses is revealed: their scent hints at sour drops and salt sprays, tears and regrets and the million contradictions lodged in the heart.
Copyright (c) by Alegria Imperial 2009
Published in Eleventh Flash in the Pan at Tiny Lights magazine
Posted for One Shot Wednesday 53rd week at One Stop Poetry, that inimitable gathering place for poets and artists. Check out what we share and do hop in!
soft rain/spring wind/white dust (spring memories haiku)
soft rain–
she spins a ball
from memories
spring wind
on nodding daffodils–
my ‘No’ again
white dust
on boxes of three years–
still wind
sunless spring day haiku
1.
gray spring dawn–
the shiver of daffodils
in my bones
2.
this cold–
Sakura cherry blossoms
on my window
3.
this sunless spring day
chickadees chatter on–
my indecisions
route (sequence with a lesson on how to breathe life to a ‘lifeless haiku’)
on a bench—
granny arching
to a waltz
on the ground
black-eyed posies,
but not for me
over head
a robin trills, i race
the train
pine strand
flailing in night sky—
the first low star
pasta bowl
and cranberry juice
with no one
Published in LYNX XXIII:3, October 2008
These were separate haiku I labored to make ‘perfect’ but hardly ever tried to submit, having at that time received one rejection after another. And so, I put them together as a titled sequence and got an acceptance from Werner Reichold, my first publication after my one and only haiku award from VCBF haiku invitational.
But as I’m won’t to do, two of the haiku have since danced on into a full poem in free verse: #3 became “first kiss” posted here for One Shoot Sunday, #4 out of the image ‘flailing in the night sky’, I wrote “revenant” published in The Cortland Review.
Lesson: on how to save one’s own self from ‘grief’ of a ‘lifeless haiku’ or how to breathe life on a ‘lifeless haiku’
Do not delete/discard/bury it. Instead, keep it wrapped in angels’ wings.
Let it sleep the sleep of bulbs of daffodils and star lilies.
Wait for spring in your spirit.
And then, unwrap them, buff them and watch the wings stir, flapping weakly at first.
And then, with your touch, watch the lines soar!
Masquerade (for one shot Wednesday)
On stubbly grass unthinking on my heels, I crush a pair
of yellow dots here on a nameless hill-rise where
spark these fallen stars—
perhaps?
Thumb-sized faces, touching shyness, such subterfuge for such
malicious growth: these weeds whose birth in helium
augur choking death to promises of
rose-lipped tulips and such
or nodding daffodils and flare-collared narcissus. But my pupils
to its petals the dandelion-look cannot but inveigle, openness
its sheath of innocence so unlike
the earnestness
ivy creepers throttle a birch or the blatant avarice a herd of agile paws
and furry tails sidestep my indifference, trembling to un-husk
a single nut, pointed jaws nibbling time—no
pretenses there. Masquerades
I would rather find, disguises to my own guises—the sun-gazing
adoring face-thrusting-trust dandelions pose on a universe
of pupils, mine for one but not mine, whose malevolent
leaps spring from
fear. I, who face no fear of thwarted rebirths from tumescent bulbs
or such other spurts of life I could cause, see no power in these
weeds I now half bend to gaze at as if loving them
flowering, relishing
the sound of their name. These weeds, are they perhaps a kin
to Leo, the constellation the overbearing sun
rules? Could they be remnants of colliding
stars, battling their way
as if certain a center lay in the black void and bursting, littered
a blue dot where on patches, this hill-rise for one, struck
a bed for them to mutate and transmogrify? If
they were
I need not wonder then why they deserve such spite—rolling as
weeds these minute suns in masquerade, I know as
I know what I am.
I am posting this poem for One Shot Wednesday at the One Stop Poetry blog.
Join us – throw in your verses. Here are the rules (taken directly off their blog):
1. Write a poetic piece & post it on your blog
2. Then let us know about your post. Link back to One Shot
3. Sign up in the Mr Linky list, linking directly to your post, AFTER you’ve posted it.
4. Go visit others who have signed up! Offer support & encouragement. Share your love of words and insight respectfully. Please try to visit as many participating poets as you can. We all could use and appreciate kind feedback.
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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