An invitation to NaHaiWriMo…
…at the NaHaiWriMo Facebook site: In exactly eight days, the shortest month, February, begins. Aptly so timed when it started two years ago, National Haiku Writing Month (NHWM) as an event for the short poetic form, will be in full blast once again! As if we, who joined the first time, have let up because we haven’t long after February was over and the rest of the year unfolded and on to now.
Long after we’ve taken on the challenge of writing a haiku a day, we kept on at the NHWM Facebook site. From the rather small group we’ve started we’re almost a thousand now, I believe, that have turned into an enthusiastic and supportive community. I’m not only glad I stayed, I’m hooked!
haiku has not only intensified my writing, it has sharpened my senses to everything around me: the wind, the sky, clouds and the moon, the scent of evenings, the feel of wings, a slight twitch in an eye, a pasted wisp of hair on wan temples, etc. etc. of hummingbirds and raccoons and failed meringue. This concentrated poetic form has helped me see through ambiguities faster than I used to. And the wonder never stops with each three lines or one-or two-line haiku that I compose. It’s not an exclusive experience, too. Each poet responding to a prompt everyday could attest to this. And by the way, midway last year, Michael Dylan Welch put together our first anthology, “With Cherries on Top”, which I had posted here.
I invite you then, better yet, I challenge you to take it up; like I did, just take the plunge and see where it takes you. Check it out at www.nahaiwrimo.com
“With Cherries on Top” (a NaHaiWriMo ebook, the first of its kind haiku anthology)
“More than something to keep like journals we’ve been published in, for me this is a treasure because I have a small hand in it. Like the 30 other prompters, on whose prompts I, too, wrote, I also had the privilege to select more than five for the collection out of which Michael Dylan Welch made the final choice; in other words, I know the process that went into its making quite intimately.
But most of all, I’ll always read each haiku loving it as the work of a NaHaiWriMo friend, most of whom I’ve written with on the same page every day and still do. Thanks again, Michael, for the great work you’ve poured into this superb anthology—the first of its kind, I believe. And congrats to us all, NaHaiWriMo poets!
Definitely a treasure! Superb haiku by NaHaiWriMo poets and awesome images so apt together!” —Alegria Imperial
The history of this book is a major part of my personal history of writing haiku. I’ve written most of it in this blog. I’m sure you have noticed how my haiku has taken shape since I signed up on Facebook because of National Haiku Writing Month (NaHaiWriMo). All it asked of anyone is to write a haiku a day. I joined in mostly because I’ve met Michael Dylan Welch, who is to me everything to a haiku, and from whom I keep learning.
His role in my haiku life started with my first ever haiku award in the 2007 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival (VCBF) Haiku Invitational, which was also my first published haiku. He was a judge that year and I met him at Van Dusen Gardens during the Cherry Blossoms Festival a year later. I had my first ginko walk with him, too, at the gardens. How could I not trust the Facebook site he created?
As well, Melissa Allen, who I met through our blogs, by then already on to her place in English haiku, had announced NaHaiWriMo. Also at the fourth meeting of our then newly formed Vancouver Haiku Group, Jessica Tremblay, now of Old Pond Comics fame, also a VCBF winner, who came for her first member meeting, reminded us of NaHaiWriMo.
It turned out NaHaiWriMo couldn’t end in a month. We, who hopped in, wouldn’t let up and so, it’s still on. In August, Michael came up with this idea of a-prompter-a-day instead of just one for the month. This book is what it was. I know, dear readers and followers of jornales, that you love haiku. Inflame it with this “With Cherries on Top”, a haiku anthology written by poets of varying haiku-writing stages, demonstrating the very essence of haiku which is: With senses wakened is how we find newness in the same things or what we think is the same day every day, and writing it down into a haiku renews the very thing as much as the poet and those to whom the haiku is shared. I’m sure our haiku will enrich you beyond its more than a hundred pages.
My haiku on ‘watermelon’ prompt by Stella Pierides
watermelon moon
our burdens lighter
than we thought
(Because I haven’t updated this blog to be able to encrypt a link, you might want to copy and past this on your browser or simply click on the link on my blogroll)
https://sites.google.com/site/nahaiwrimo/with-cherries-on-top
a dragonfly/zips into a tower–/what I remember (a 9/11 repost from filipineses09)
911 REVISITED (REPOST FROM A 2010 POST)
September 12, 2011, 1:55 am
It’s still for me a searing memory…that morning 10 years ago
a dragonfly/zips into a tower–/what I remember
Visit to a Hallowed Ground
I looked on a shallow dish of dirt, raked and dug out, and still seething. From where I stood at the portico of St. Peter’s Church on Barclay Street from across what used to be the World Trade Center, I gazed and gaped incredulous. How could it seem so small, so nothing now?
That now hallowed ground I had once walked on, eyes up where the twin towers held up the sky, was raw like a vulture’s leftover meal — the vulture that had zipped into it from the same sky.
The smell of burning still tarnished the air: it was sharp and pungent. Thin spirals of smoke still seeped off the ground where the dying has not ended. There was a stench in the downtown train I thought must be someone’s mess or as the friend I was with said, could be the cleaning agent used. And then, I realized it was the stench of decaying flesh.
For the first time on this visit to New York, three months after the disaster that the world now calls by its date, September Eleven, I finally lived the nightmare.
I could not recognize turns on the streets I learned by heart a whole summer I lived in New York. I had to let go, and be led on by the steady stream of people, moving about in a daze like me. We have walked into a city that was pummeled, ripped, and blown in parts; it felt strange.
The buildings around the World Trade Center, once glinting towers now scarred and wearing ashes have turned old and looked haunted. Delis and coffee shops serving breakfast at 8:45 that morning have grown frost where they had stood still. (In which of them had I once shared with a friend the tastiest sticky bun ever one morning we walked this far?) But I had yet to find the remains of that day.
We had stopped at every cross street that opened to Ground Zero, and hung our heads. We had stalled, holding back tears, where instant graves had blossomed on wrought iron fences or granite walls. The graves drew out the grief, and tears gave names to what were earlier anonymous faces: A wife to one of those still missing stumbled into a huddle, and crumbled to the ground, touching a framed picture adorned with ribbons now frayed and fading. She had visited this grave each day since. A brother to one still lost crept from behind us quietly planting another candle where what he lit last night was dying. He had no way of telling if his brother was among the dead; he was still missing like many who walked into that ordinary summer day but whose bodies have not been found.
A wind ruffled the pages of a letter a grandmother had pinned on a young woman’s framed portrait, detailing how her oh so innocent two-year old son regaled the family with stories of a visit to the zoo in last weekend’s tearful dinner. A scrap of lined paper, bold scripts now blotted, was a young boy’s inspired poem on the heroic death of those he didn’t personally know. The ‘graves’ were now a mosaic of grief; none of us who strayed into them could stay around for long.
Memories of the nightmare played on. On these same streets, thousands of wounded had limped, transformed by terror and grief. Some had lost their hair in the fire, others, half their faces. The sirens had screamed, flying through the night and days from then on. New York congealed into a mass of the helpless hurt, the faceless who came to help, and the cops and firemen who gave their lives to others whose names they had no chance to ask. Blood flowed from cut limbs, and also from veins held up for the taking. This city of spunk and internal faces broke into a weeping, sobbing, moaning humanity. We, who lived through the nightmare whole days on end on television, could only imagine half the reality then.
From St. Peter’s portico, we glued our eyes on those giant combs of steel, the cranes that moved clumsy marionette arms; the diggers had not stopped sifting for remains. They had gone deep underground, out of our sight. After this visit, when they hit what used to be the Cortland subway stop, five more bodies turned up. But where we huddled, necks craned to Ground Zero on this visit, there was nothing else we could see out there. What I kept staring at instead, and like perhaps those strangers around me did, were spots on the ground that held memories, my own…
(read the rest of it at my other blog filipineses09, just click on my blogroll. Also I’m trying to double check this: this was nominated for a Pushcart Award 2010 by Sketchbook but I cannot find my record of it. Perhaps because it was just too overwhelming, almost incredulous, that I lost it but I know I’ll find it or maybe not among my messy files.)
all i can see (sequence in black and white, take off from the NaHaiWriMo facebook site)
all i can see–
black and white
in your eyes
gray–
when the sun falls
on your lies
black–
dregs settling
our arguments
white–
our window blinds
turned down
ashes
on the burner your note
in black and white
Copyright (c) by Alegria Imperial 2011
(take off from Melissa Allen’s prompt, black and white, at the still-on NaHaiWriMo facebook site)
soil in Golgotha (my Good Friday haiku posted at NaHaiWriMo wall)
soil in Golgotha
only crosses bear fruit
here
(my Good Friday haiku posted at the still-on NaHaiWrimo facebook wall written for the prompt, dirt/soil)
believing/faces i miss (haiku on NaHaiWriMo facebook wall)
believing
we’re walled in–
my goldfish and i
faces i miss–
some rain-washed stones
on neighbor’s wall
(re-worked haiku I posted on the still-on NaHaiWriMo facebook wall from a prompt by my friend, Melissa Allen: walls)
‘deception’ prompt by Melissa Allen at NaHaiWriMo (yes, it’s still on!)
chameleon–
wondering who you are
now
eclipse–she changes her alias
in the morning
her puppet voice
in person his voice thinner
The National Writing Month (NaHaiWriMo) continues on the facebook site. Causing such frenzy among haiku writers of all stages–the masters and beginners encouraging and liking each other–its admin decided to keep it going. Michael Dylan Welch created the magnificant site in February. Alan Summers took over last month (March) to give the daily prompts, perks with great uplifiting words on the haiku and the poet, and some instant workshop with lessons. Melissa Allen (note my badge: ‘She, Red Dragonly, is my friend’) tackles this month’s prompts, as well as the rest, and I’m sure more of what often made the postings rather ‘wild’. Go get a facebook account and join in!
red nose haiku–isn’t it past the season? No, according to Alan Summers’ prompt at NaHaiWriMo…so my take
It’s Red Nose Day today, according to Alan. There’s a link that came with the prompt at http://www.rednoseday.com. It’s a day to be funny, and earn for charity. A really wonderful idea to turn laughter into real joy for those who are in need of things others have taken for granted and from those who must have forgotten laughter is also a basic need. I thought the prompt was a real challenge. But I think these haiku work in a way. I focused on Santa’s Rudolph first and realized, a red nose is also a clown’s, indeed!
#18
clown
washes freckles off
and tattoed red nose
#18b
vampire–
makes the children laugh
with his red nose
#18c
class laughter–
he points to his red nose
on his forehead
#18d
little boy asks
clown with two red noses on ears,
“who are you?”
#18e
the mourners–
sniffling through and wiping
their red noses
between her/and his goodbye…(posted on the continuing NaHaiWriMO fb site #prompt-partings)
between her
and his goodbye–
sudden hail
#5 for March
prompt–meetings and partings from ASummers
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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