inner cities (a sort of versified haibun, an experiment)

 

draperies of wrinkled winds the affectations we traded for dawn kisses straining the moon

listen to the children beginning their climb on a spiral of electives we elders concocted out of broken yarn

they’ll string them together with knots we had thought as we waxed the yarn sliding them between our canines

a child bursts into a scream at birth shedding his mother’s blood-coating a slimy red he knew he did not need but by then gurgling through his veins

this evening of attrition it’s blood roiling unseen that drives him to untangle the net he knotted and wove from broken yarn those strands his mother also called blood

we watch out for when he and his siblings scramble up our limbs and bite our tongue and begin to scale the spiral to the moon

 

a tale of inner cities

…flat lining a wall

random haiku (from my posts at the NaHaiWriMo wall)

a.
reggae–
the sun dripping
on his basin

b.
she hurtles
notes into the rapids—
the jazz pianist

c.
homecoming–
he smiles
into her fingers

d.
chrysalis—
the other life
begins

e.
his purring
on cellos from my CD player—
evening thrum

evening breeze…azalea (haiku)

evening breeze–
the azalea quivers
as we breathe

evening wall (for One Shoot Sunday)

photo prompt by James Rainsford

the evening wall
leaks morning in silence
a tremor
in the breeze alters the vines
leaves dance disgraced
for river stones
but my cave resists
the shame

i dig into my bones
for secrets
complicities the dark sharpens
the stench of fear
light alludes to ageing roses
in truth
rotting roots falsehoods
smoother

in the night
i listen to winds lash
at recalcitrant stars
then limping in the heights fall
a thin flight through the bars
a moth
hissing on its wings

my cage
burdens reckoning
crude mornings lie to me
disguised as Venus rising
i cannot tell
in my fallow depths
who awaits for me to relent
cawing

(c) Copyright by Alegria Imperial 2011

Posted for One Shoot Sunday with picture prompt by James Rainsford for One Stop Poetry, winner of the 2011 Shorty Award for the Arts, the one place to gather for poets and artists to share their love for their art. Check us out. Click on my blogroll for OSP.

deep in a pool (tanka though still not sure)

deep in a pool
a school of tadpoles wriggling
inveigles my thoughts
of a summer evening
to fall in love with a frog

It’s strange how thoughts take on an unintended form or lines simply write themselves out as if they simply ooze out of fingertips like this tanka-ish reflection. The image emerged from a ginko walk at the Chinese Buddhist Temple in Richmond we of the Vancouver Haiku Group had a month ago. The ‘pool’ is the bonsai pool but not tadpoles, instead a school of gold fish darted through moss covered stones. So why the frog? I had thought of Basho and the frog then out of nowhere or perhaps the stillness water always brings on in me as in that morning while gazing at the depth on the pool invited the frog to my lines…how strange and unexpected thought processes can be sometimes.

haibun: my first shooting star (para mi hermana, Margaret)

A haibun attempt as promised for Margaret, mi hermana de mi alma, in a comment on Stargazing at haikudoodle

I wrote this as a journal some ten years ago when I stayed at Angeles Estates in Munoz, Nueva Ecija, the Philippines’ central plains. Nothing but acres of rice fields, edged by the Sierra Madres the sky most evenings did tantalize. One evening I finally caught a shooting star…

It flared in the shape of wings, and was gone in a blink – my first shooting star.

Before then, a moon was sailing past its fullness, but brimming in the edges. It was cruising toward a thin veil of clouds, sailing through an iridescent sky. Its ride must have been bumpy on the grainy surface, but dreamy from a tender blue light beaming underneath that sieve.

In the glow, the lawn turned murky beige, the leaves of the escarlatina (frangipani), dark and glinting; and the gumamela blooms, pallid and droopy.

My eyes were trailing a white dog, yellowed under a weak moon, when the star must have started to skid. When I turned to break a branch to whip the ground and drive the dog away—that was when I glimpsed the flare.

It had vanished before I could breathe. I laughed; my laughter had bubbled off my heart without my coaxing. When I turned for someone whom I can tell of my star, the night had turned: the moon had burst out of the clouds, the blooms began to glisten; and the dog was gone.

shooting star—
a flap of wings
the same sky?

AE gardens during the day

Escarlatina in the sun

Also posted in http://www.iluko.com with a few paragraphs which I attempted to translate in Iluko. More pictures and information on the estate at http://www.angelesestates.com

take 3 (edit)

Oh, nooo! I lost the red dragonflies in “picking autumn leaves comment”–not in the bingo prize (pomegranate)!

Here is what maybe I meant:

on an evening trail
of red dragonflies swarming
in a pool, stars

evening

evening–

murmurs sink deeper

into the hedge

A jornal just to survive–for now.