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

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granite wall

granite wall
a cold touch so hard
to resist

alegria imperial txt/eleanor angeles photo

‘on pointed toes’, ‘haze’ (my two tanka in LYNX Oct 2012)

1

on pointed toes

like ripples, why not?
if floating

the way we do in void
we find what matters


2

haze
like the opaqueness we dread

a crust
the guise soft hearts
take on to survive


LYNX October 2012

Robert Frost’s stone house in Shaftsbury, Vermont

 

He had bought this house to try his hand at farming but quite unsuccessfully, yet he kept it, visiting it intermittently while he taught in and around the state. The house is now a modest museum with sparse furniture but paneled with text, chronicling his life and poetry. It’s here in a room facing south of what is now a field of wild flowers that he wrote his most anthologized and quoted poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” one June morning following the winter he went horse riding. The room is dedicated to the poem, including how he wrote it—as a whole in one sweep—controversies regarding a comma, discussions and debates on what he meant by his most quoted stanza, as well as critics’ attempts at drawing out from him more than what he wrote. They agree on the ‘ulteriority’ of his poetry as he insisted there is no hidden meaning in his lines. He simply meant ‘it was getting late and I had to go home.’ But debates rage on…

 

“…The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.”

As a lover of his poetry, having been introduced to ‘his woods’ in my youth in a faraway tropical country, visiting his house has meant, for me, finding fulfillment of a yet another vague dream.

Alegria Imperialtxt/Eleanor Angelespix

‘Sayonara’ (a haibun on Fukushima inspired by a tv news reel)

News reel from a Philippine television coverage in Sendai. Families evacuated, the newscaster intones. The Philippine embassy has sent the bus to fetch Filipino-Japanese families to safer Tokyo ground.

we gather our own
in prayer–
a quiet sea

The camera catches fear on young mother’s faces, Filipino mothers, their long straight hair undone by the wind-driven snow. Bundles and backpacks like humps on their slender backs and sides bounce as they race away from shattered homes to the bus, children scrambling along, giant stuffed animal-pillows, dragging them in the danger-laced air. Inside the bus, the camera pans to pillow fights the kids have started, then close-up to a baby asleep, mouth open in lamb-like calm. A mother fusses over a girl’s stuck-up zipper. Mild chaos, more of confusion.

bedtime
lullabies and stories–
the breathing bus
slips into a dream of stars
the old moon grins

Camera returns to the scene left behind, focuses on a man in wordless soundless grief waving his hand as if in a quiet dance of despair, sometimes folding his arms as if to stem the flow of pain. He had opted to stay, the newscaster sustains his even tone. How could he leave? To leave one’s life behind is to die. To lose perhaps, never to see a wife and child again? That’s also death. The camera pans back to the desolate street. The bus moves away.

Sayonara
he waves mutely
in the falling snow
the bus swallows steam
wife and son and tears

Sendai sea–
how far is the other side?

NB

Posted soon after the tragic calamity but I deleted it when I included it to a call for submission for the anthology just published, “We Are All Japan”. Never did get any response from the editors but apparently, it was declined. Just learning how to craft both haibun and tanka then, a year ago. But I’m posting it again for what it’s worth, hoping you would feel what I felt.

The tangential connection of the tsunami destruction and my haibun comes from a personal history between Japan and the Philippines. During that unfortunate war (WWII), many families lost their fathers without goodbyes, my mother’s family, for one. Hardly ever spoken about in my childhood, I grew up nonetheless with a heavy pall of sorrow from the absence of a grandfather whom the Japanese Imperial Army excuted before I was born. No corpus was ever found but tales of how he was made to kneel for beheading abound. When I watched the news reel from a Philippine tv channel, it touched me deeply and from that core of pain this haibun wrote itself out.

‘pine strand’ one of 365 haiku on your mobile phone

Read a haiku-a-day on your mobile phone. Yes, simply access your haiku app and anyone of the 365 haiku would show up as you click or shake your screen. You might read mine:

pine strand
flailing in night sky—
the first low star

Alegria Imperial
Lynx XXIII (2008)

The Haiku Foundation Haiku app Data Base 2012

‘some nights’ & ‘come feel’, 2 more tanka from GUSTS Spring/Summer 2012

some nights
the moon hides its face
for healing
like our other side
that needs to be unseen

come feel
this frozen bud
let’s learn
from its tight lips
the secret of roses

GUSTS 15 Spring/Summer 2012, Tanka Canada

five haiku, my offering for National Haiku Poetry Day

moon flitting

from staccato dawn

an owl hoots

 

swigging in the pine copse raccoon eyes

 

is the fox a man in his dream?

snow melt

 

a zebra

snorts

at jet stream

moonset

 

ivy wall

its shadowed side

sunlit sighs

 

my bilingual haiku, tanka and free verse for National Poetry of the Month guest post at haikudoodle

Excerpts from Margaret Dornaus’ blog today

http://haikudoodle.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/national-poetry-month-guest-post-6-alegria-imperial/

(or click on haikudoodle on my blogroll)

haiku

(Iluko with English translations by the author)

 

 

batbato iti
kapanagan
sabsabong ti sardam

 

stones
on the riverbank
dawn flowers…

 

 

LYNX XXIV: February 2009

 

tanka (Iluko with English translations by the author)
ayuyang-limdo
diay aripit ballasiw
ditoy a sumken
sinit a nalidliduan
nagtinnag nga anem-em

a haunt for sadness
the dried creek at the crossroad
here they recur
those untended flushes
turned chronic fevers…

 

LYNX XXV (June): 2, 2010

 

agsapa (in Iluko with translations by the author)

by Alegria Imperial

 

naimayeng

dagiti bituen idi mangngegda

ti as-asug

dagiti bulong iti sipnget

 

narba

dagiti pinatanor ti lawag

iti danarudor

dagiti agam-ammangaw

 

Bannawag, the Ilocano vernacular magazine of the Ilocos region in northern Philippines, May 16, 2009

 

 

dawn

(a loose translation with some nuances substituted as in some verbs, which in Iluko already imply a subject, and nouns that need no adjectives)

 

startled,

stars fell in the dark

among leaves

pining over lost suns–

 

loves

that light birthed

drowned in the roar of the

faithless….

 

 

http://haikudoodle.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/national-poetry-month-guest-post-6-alegria-imperial/

bay mouth (haiku–random post for National Poetry Writing Month)

Random post for National Poetry Writing Month

bay mouth

the strangeness

of first meetings

Notes from the Gean 3:4 March 2012