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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chilled lines (haiga shared at Fusion)

chilled lines sunsets once

 

reflection composed with doodooo on my iPod

shared at Fusion

‘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

here there where (at qarrtsiluni’s ‘fragments’ issue)

day in the park

a cat eats weed flowers. my dog sits on the bird bath. a mom spreads a picnic blanket for baby’s feeding bottles. three crows swoop in on my bag of popcorn. a weed flower sticks to my dress.

the baby drools. on her blue bib. the sky turns golden.

i gather my crumbs under the blooming junipers. i pull up a heather. a squirrel flies over my head on a twig.
chippers chatter.

my heather turns blue. the baby picks a dandelion. the sun slides down. over skies a swarm of snowbirds fly home. i have no wings.

silence

silence is not the absence of sound. a sheer wall in the mind perhaps. a blockade for the heart. one cannot hear a heartbeat. the whooshing of blood in and out of ventricles. blubbering air in the lungs. a grumbling emptiness in guts. random complaints from muscles trapped in passions.

silence as gaping space traps what fills air waves. winds that fissures slurp. secrets blossoms share. coughing of uncouth machines. grating wheels those dumpsters edging out magpies. the cawing of crows to be understood. marble chirps colliding with fresh acorns among the pines. sonatas on toes around the rim of dreams.

births are seeded in silence. in secret. the first cry is a child of silence. wakefulness its gender.

new calendar

first day of the year. just another grey day. a pall on the new calendar. as if what makes a difference really doesn’t.

the ticking clock. a distant squawking of a crow or better yet, complaint. deep sigh of engines passing by. the trudge goes on.
i look on the cypress with a creeping sense of sorrow. the deep cold dark in its twigs. holiday gifts piled beside it now debris.
a black garbage bag rests folded in the bin.

i gather the cards. wishes slide off my fingers. a bag of pebbles waits to be planted in the vase. like wishes that might take root, i would have to water them each day.

blue notes waver in the light. as if there’s something i should know.

death still

death still on the shore. no breath lapping sand. the bay water clear as eyes. a selvage edge of secrets. a quiet suspiration under a translucent film of air. a shimmer that wavers underneath over shell shards.

emptied mollusks. spawning stones. furry algae. fibrous weeds.

dead still but not sealed. only walled in. like your eyes, when you stare within. an absent look. a vacant thought. like i’m not there.

http://qarrtsiluni.com/2012/08/21/here-there-where/

A special piece for me. All four reveal how I really write. Most of it have somehow strayed to a few of my haiku or tanka or even haibun. But this is me. I thank qarrtsiluni for this 2nd acceptance and publication.

I’m sorry for the vacant days. I’ve just been so busy with projects and the writing of a Sunday column for a broadsheet, Business Mirror Philippines. I’ll strive to catch up soon. Thanks for your continued support!

morning dew/and still, a scratchy…(my haiku at LYNX June 2012)

morning dew
and still, a scratchy
cricket song

LYNX, June 2012

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

‘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