the Date (a haibun)

I haven’t posted a haibun in a long while. Here’s one I wrote yesterday:

the Date

I turn towards the brambles—there’s nothing but twig skeletons, and dumpsters waiting for the undertaker. The bus driver takes a minute to shake off the drizzle from his hair, another to brush his moustache, take his jacket off, fluff the cushion on his seat, wiggle for comfort, secure his belt in, fix the mirrors to his eye level, chipping off three hundred or so seconds, splintering my anxiety. The sun would have edged to its zenith by now, the moon fading in its rims, and the bay inhaling air globules soon to heave and ebb. I’ve distended into a thin membrane of capillaries throbbing with a star, waiting for his name to come up in my mind.

 

mnemonic drill

the trench deeper

in sand dunes

 

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rehearsal break (haiku on dance at NaHaiWriMo)

sea otters holding hands by Joe Robertson, Austin, TX courtesy of wikicommons

rehearsal break

catching some sea breeze

in dreams

posted for NaHaiWrimo under ‘dance’ prompt by Carlos Colon

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.

‘buttonhole’ haiga4 for 19 Planets Arts Blog

haiga4 another clip art creation with Microsoft Publisher

buttonhole–
fireflies sneak
into my dreams

Another post composed with clip art on Microsoft Publisher for Rick Daddario’s haiga-a-day 19 Planets Art Blog.

The haiku came out of a reflection about dreams and fireflies. How often like children do we wonder what makes what seems not possible possible like what makes a firefly glow in the dark. Science does explain it with a chemical they carry like luminescent creatures of the sea. We say, ahhh to that. But tell that to a child and she looks at air. Nothing there. I must have done it many times as a child because the wonder stayed. No matter how much I read now as an adult and discover answers to what once was unexplainable, I remain with the mystery and the dream. And for me, fireflies will always be those fallen stars I used to catch as a child and slept with one, if I did, in my tight fist, expecting it would still twinkle when I wake up.

transmutation (for One Shoot Sunday)

Photo prompt by Adam Romanowicz.

trapped in a shell
of dreams, the night careens
into an abyss–
the paradise of mollusks
unknown to stars

alien, Night
drowns in crystal tears
engorging shell hearts
layering an encrusted
stone

the sea lashes
the mollusks and turns
Night into strands
of sea spray
Night, the alien

grows eyes
globules of crystals
floating as froth
a veil to hide the birthing
mollusks

Night, the witness
in paradise becomes the sea
as heaving shells open
to let breathe the pearl
they birth

startled
in the blinding brightness
Night leaps and grows wings
springing off its eyes
jewels of sparks

an ocean breath
exhales Night back to dying stars
Night, the prodigal
now smithereens of tears
rain on cupped leaves

frozen as
bejeweled Dawn
on leaf strands
en-clasped like it were
its heart

a shell

Composed from a photo prompt by Adam Romanowicz and
posted for One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry, the inimitable gathering place for poets and artists. Come immerse yourself, better yet share your work and your ideas about others’. Check us out!

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!

riddle (for One Shot Wednesday featured and critiqued by Jendi Reiter at winningwriters.com)

from flints flung off
cliffs where crags snag
fledglings came my seed,
buried, until as sapling
i spiraled off ground. air
feeds me but it turns

poison when i exhale, cracks
when as blossom i break,
feigning petulance. i am crowned
when i abscond words.

i bear fruit when my
flesh oozes. my dreams
drip when birds hang where i gaze
on a promise; moons that sprout on my limbs i count
as wings resisting winds.

my yearnings
wear out the sun, singe my heart
a thousand times. but always
at dawn i bud.

Copyright 2008 by Alegria Imperial
Critique by Jendi Reiter at http://www.winningwriters.com October 2008

Posted for One Shot Wednesday at One Stop Poetry, THE gathering place for poets and artists of inimitable works who also nurture each other. Check us out. Better yet, hop in!

Shuffled seasons (for One Shoot Sunday)

photo prompt by Greg Laychak

The narrow aisle flows a river to a wall
Of white thought

What squares of light have no glow
On the surface of water?

Who spawns the flat bed of dreams my steps
Struggle to cover?

Imprisoned by air I breathe a stale paradise
Of jasmine blossoms

I hear the rain a hissing of limbs on trees
But the moon does not rise

Day ends at my door night turns the stars
Upside down

‘”Where is your walker?” “Excuse moi?” What tongue
Speaks in this land?

“You cannot leave without it?” “Why, who’s heading out?”
The grubs I picked wriggle

In my closed fist I am growing a butterfly
No one knows

In my bareness I feel drenched in dew my bones
Misaligned rattle

“Now let’s go back in.” “Who has left her?”
No one comes today

I draw a caul on the day withdraw into night
Retrieve what’s lost

The sign posts melt on the flowing river
My hair long undone

I shuffle the seasons: in my eyes autumn leaves fall
But cherry blossoms

Oh, he rises to me my cane I draw my arms a lover
Now my wings

Copyright (c) by Alegria Imperial 2011

Written with an image prompt by Greg Laychak for One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry, winner of the 2011 Shorty Award for the Arts, the inimitable gathering place for poets and artists. Share with us as we do ours your art or poetry and your thoughts. Check us out.

the calm/rereading cards/round and round (3 tanka on the calm from the earthquake elsewhere)

Mie and me on her last visit to Vancouver

1.
the calm–
from Kyoto Mie writes
far from earthquake
the wedding garden today
light snow on cherry buds

2.
rereading cards–
from Michio in Saitama
her New year’s wishes
of Rabbit hopes and dreams
today mine for her in pray’r

3.
round and round
moon and earth mirror each other
chaos of winds
ruined faces blemished cheeks
to be cleansed over and over

purring/the only sound…(a haiku that went on to be a vignette, not a haibun)

purring–
the only sound
between them

…as if it is unusual, marks the way evening falls ever so quietly in our lives in the winter. The cold bars us in, our thoughts seemingly unto each own. Winter, I once said, drawing a deep long sigh, asks of us a wearying task of digging into our burrows alone and not together. He had quipped, like squirrels and hares and bears, right?

He makes light of the dark, that’s him, my friend and lover. I see beyond everything and make too much of it, as he describes my thought patterns. As if I hardly change, as if the seasons pass me by and like a portrait on stone–my pose in reverie engraved the way I must look right now, looking out to the soft snow glowing on its own light as it falls. No sound except Kat-kat sleeping, purring its dreams.

Don’t worry, he breaks the silence. In a few weeks, the bare trees will sprout, he says without looking at me from the book he’s reading. I know, I murmur. I know. The cold winds will curl up and roll into the depths of seas. Heat will seep off the waters and the dark frozen earth, breathing life back to whatever withered and died in the cleansing whiteness of snow. I’m not worried or sad, if that’s what you think, I retort delayed. I’m simply pondering…

…and I continue. A clump of snowdrops by the gate will spawn again shy as virgin girls who would never look up to their lovers’ eyes. In a while, crocuses will raise their buds like pursed lips, waiting for a kiss. Not filigreed lawns but front gardens dotted with Queen Anne’s lace will soon unfurl. This morning, I glimpsed pregnant knuckles of hydrangea twigs, though the cherry trees in the winter sun remain starkly bare, and flapping among winter debris, the nuthatch, an early migrant bird. Spring, a brief and giddying season, I know, always seems to burst and spangle the skies with cherry blossoms, white plums and magnolias as if overnight…but I must end here and take the rest of the seasons in a new cycle of our lives.

Kat-kat wakes up, looks out the window and tightens up to a hunter’s pose. I follow her eyes to a stirring in the trees. Not a leaf but a nuthatch. Spring, I cry out! I told you so, he says without looking.

Possibly a haibun? No it can’t be because one of the many features of a haibun according to “Poetry Form-The haibun” from J. Zimmerman’s book, parts of which can be read on the web, is that “The haiku is not a linear continuation of the prose” or in this case, I suppose not an introduction to the prose.

In this post, the vignette just took over from the haiku. I see it though as a string of several possible haiku!