at bones journal–my single haiku and sequence
(I’m sorry, I can’t add color to the font anymore!)
single haiku
his stud pearl earring about a seahorse
damaged sky–
the clue
is in a shoe box
Bones, July 2013
anatomy notes sequence
body matters
for mannequins
chopped off heads
knee plates bob
up and down
at cross purpose
checked
lying down…slouched
chins
delete
stumbling block
for flat feet
no. 10—
a gag on his fingers
as with silk
his old organ
gasps a night song…
crossed out
scored
a heart beat equals
flushed pee
spire…
whose dirty nail
bores a moon?
green tongue
the consul’s deafness
to her pleas
body tag-
at blank hrs to island
of Langerhans
Bones 2 July 2013
WITH AN OPEN MIND (/MAP)
What a vivid sensory experience this column item by Stella Pierides wrote in Note from the Gean’s ‘haikumatters’!! It rumbled through my mind, exciting me to think indeed what map do I have? And here it is: “Oh, the map I use? It’s uncharted and unnamed. It’s wild woods and a black forest. There are lakes and pools but also bogs, smokey in the deep. Unless ‘I find a flower I can name’, it’s hard even for me to find my way back. Birds sing and talk but mostly unseen except the owl. Sometimes, he reveals their name. I’ve taken notes but forget about them the moment I walk in. The map is always new, uncharted and unnamed. I know it’s not good but maybe the owl will help someday somehow.”
The last of my haiku in DailyHaiku’s Cycle 14
February 23, 2013
palm reader’s eyelashes my fortune in a hat pin
wall portraits—
I begin my yoga count
from the top
turtle pond
a girl shares unshelled
peanuts
first stanza . . .
the missing subject
is a snail
adrift
in a fishbowl . . .
stray moon
what if
beneath footfalls
an egg laid
always
a raindrop hangs on her gaze—
Black-eyed Susan
to read in succession the whole Cycle 14 click on DailyHaiku
on my blog roll and go to archives
Thank you for staying with me in this haiku journey
(artwork is mine from a doodle play on my iPod touch)
…
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
enormity, my haiga at NTFG January 2013
enormity in and out
a haiga at Notes from the Gean, January 2013
Colin Stewart Jones, editor
composed on my iPod Touch with Eastern drawing
magpie gripes (another unpublished haiga, an experimental image)
magpie gripes
over empty skies
a haiga from my iPod, the third line being the image or what and how it is read as a composite
would the moon (an unpublished haiga)
would the moon
descend this low
for love?
ai, haiku/esa, image 2012
(blue heron perched high up on a weeping willow by the Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC, where I live, taken last summer)
‘sunlight on the other side’ (a haiga)
Silk Bridge, Bennington, VT
sunlight on the other side
somehow louder
ai, haiku/esa, photo
Four-year old Miriya took this tanka to carry in her pocket: Poem in Your Pocket Day
The future of poetry especially of tanka and haiku is secure; it’s in the hands of Miriya, the four-year old daughter of poet friend Christina Nguyen. Miriya found my tanka in GUSTS 15 of Tanka Canada, which also has her mom’s and many other known friends, that apparently her mom was reading and had laid down with the page open where this tanka is. Christina told me she read it and asked to read it to her again, and in the end, asked her to write it down on a post-it so she can carry it in her pocket to read again and again. I’m not flattered but deeply honored. An angel has taken hold of my poetry, hence, in heavenly hands. It’s beyond any other honor I ever hope to achieve. Thank you Miriya and Christina.
was it you
who laid this feather
on my feet
seeking my forgiveness
in the rain?
GUSTS 15, Spring 2012
my anthologized poem featured as guest poet at Prose Posies for National Poetry Month
Thanks so much to Cara Holman for inviting me as Guest Poet at her blog, ‘Prose Posies’, for National Poetry Month on April 10, coincidentally the date when I first wrote this poem as a not-quite-sonnet, which I later worked on for submission to the Magnapoets Anthology. (Click on Prose Posies in my blogroll for Cara’s wonderful page of me and for the other daily guest poets).
To this We Wake
*
Scraps of purple on winter dawns
slung on arms of mornings
a sun awaiting for us
in between strutting seagulls
pigeons braiding shadows–
we snuggle.
*
We trace our days in dreams we
birth at dawn
when swatches of light
tickle us out to walk
on grounds of endearments our steps
have marked engraved by winds.
*
We step on
shredded blooms the seasons
gift us, stealing kisses, time on
halved imperfect whispers, wishes we rip
off the day, their ends we spangle on
skies, our secret into stars.
*
Yet we wake to another day–
what lies deeper than frost farther
than slumber, closer
to the core where
seasons sleep: to this, to this
we always wake.
*
Butterfly Away, Magnapoets Anthology Series 3, 2011
About Me from Cara’s questionnaire: (in parenthesis, what I wanted to add but changed my mind as my words started to tangle)
Alegria ‘Alee’ Imperial
Originally from Manila, Philippines now from Vancouver, Canada, (quite a simple deceiving shift of footstool in the globe)
I met you at NaHaiWriMo (where we daily shared a haiku for the same prompt for a year among many other poets. Touched by your spirit, I left parts of me in brief phrases on your space.)
Seriously into poetry in 2005, (shortly after workshop courses in fiction writing, years after writing nothing of me in media work and journalism, years of dreaming only in verse)
(I used to write more lyrical prose,) now mostly haiku, some tanka, and recently, haibun and also free verse when all three fail
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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