Just a heart (a haibun)
I honor the Force who/that sowed the seed who became me. In degrees though often unaware, I grew a heart.
from rumblings a sprout answers to a name
Lashed by winds, bathed by rains, kissed by moonrise, swaddled by fog, cradled by dawns, how can I be less than a song
neither eye nor lips the knowing sky
They say I leave footprints, scents, echoes, a ghost prowling with the fox for a lair, yet no one says my name
far off foghorns for every one
(My response, originally posted as a comment, to Dan Hasse’s powerful haibun at Facebook: thank you, Dan!!)
Window by window and We (two ‘tiny’ haibun at Prune Juice)
Window by window
She peels her mornings. A miser of darkness, she lets the sun in by strands. I saw her once. She is a flower.
at the cusp
of Cancer and Leo
a fire wheel
We
We write our names together. It’s marriage says the book. Our meals apart. It’s work. We feed different nights. In different skies. What then is it?
cross wind—
cliffs echoing
wrong echoes
prune juice November 2014
mixing bowls (my haiku at the 10th International Kukai)
mixing bowls—
the shallow echoes
of bells
4th place (tie) 10th International Kukai ‘bell’ 114 entries, 24 countries
deeper haiga
deeper
than echoes
our heartbeats
The image is an unsigned framed watercolor painting the size of a picture that I found in a second hand bookstore.
repetitions (haiga2 for 19 Planets Art Blog)
haiga2 using clip art on Microssft Publisher
ehoes
our silent repetitions
repetitions
repetitions
our silent echoes
repetitions
repetitions
of repetitions echo on silence
echoes on silence repetitions of repetitions
Posted for haiga challenge at 19 Planets Art Blog of Rick Daddario. I composed this haiga using clip art on Microsoft Publisher. The art came first and then the haiku. I seem to be good with visual prompts or I work better with them as I used to with the poems I wrote for the now defunct One Stop Poetry’s Sunday Challenge. Am I now creating my own prompts? I had never thought of it but with this second haiga, I’m starting to have fun. I hope it works.
So what’s the thought in the haiga? The cycles in our lives. The repetitions in shapes and sounds. Even invisibles our mind creates bounce back and forth as thoughts and feelings. Patterns and routes unfurl before us without our bidding. Because we need them. Repetitions. Because each day ends to begin again. Reassurances. Because each vow must be renewed. Reverberations. Because we hear better on a beat or rhyme. Repetitions because once never ends for us. Repetitions. We are embedded in them. We embed them in us.
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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