questions, your answer…a haiku series
winter silhouettes—
if blackened do nails
retell stories?
***
spiced wind
do snow tracks carry
your voice?
***
when banana hearts
peel off a lover, is it
the solstice?
***
lotus shadow…
is that frog song
a dirge?
***
tattered waves
why must keening tears
leap as an arc?
***
roaring wind
from what stone pod
do you rise?
***
sun dial
in the dark toasting
minions?
***
his arrhythmic heart
on a treadle… does the weaver
know?
***
wild wind
on dry sedge—
what more in her mind?
***
spiraling down
as fish…is the ocean
my soul?
‘on pointed toes’, ‘haze’ (my two tanka in LYNX Oct 2012)
1
on pointed toes
like ripples, why not?
if floating
the way we do in void
we find what matters
2
haze
like the opaqueness we dread
a crust
the guise soft hearts
take on to survive
LYNX October 2012
Surrender (at “Many Windows” Magnapoets 2011 anthology series 4)
On her lens a pair of wild weeds
swayed from a rock by the edge of the lake
blooming tips brushing as if in light kisses
a moving oneness that flashed at me.
On the scrabble board back home
I set the letter “s” for “surrender”.
“Tell me how,” she had asked. My answer,
like waves folding onto each other these:
The way flowers let the wind play
on weakness touching but not breaking
a kind of touch that instructs bees on
gentleness—a kiss that leaves
no mark—that glues the heart, the way
the mind pulls threads off words
let gather from winds bowers of leaves
a nest for globules of light,
name the globules love the way wind
blows out the light the way
darkness kneads itself to make love real,
the way night lets the wind sough
a kind of song that shreds the light,
clouds the heart the way the wind
tempts the dawn.
Grit not tears fractures sight
the way the wind lets dust ride, whispering
words the way some words run into verses
to crack the bolts that quarantine
lovers, unleashing them to surrender
to flee to bloom, the way
the weed pair let the wind swing,
lash at them, the way they flex together
how like love could stay possible
where it isn’t, musn’t.
First published in “Many Windows”, 2011 Magnapoets Anthology Series 4, Edited by Aurora Antonovic
Thank you, Elle, for the inspiration.
(photo: esangeles 2010, Harrison Springs, BC, Canada)
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!
squabbling crows/sunny day at Zoo/the drum beat of rain NaHaiWriMo prompts turned tanka!
1. Prompt #24 flower
squabbling crows
scream into my thoughts–
at dawn how you left
hollow imprints of sleep
scented dreams of jasmine blooms
2. prompt #25–zoo
sunny day at Zoo
lioness searches for my eyes
behind my black shades–
the way we hold our hearts
as we speak of fears and wants
3. prompt #26–drum
the drum beat of rain
on window pane imprints tears
a flood breaking hearts
in loneliness gray rain sneaks
into wells to fill the dryness
Tanka drafts I should call these because I’m certain that when I read them tomorrow, they will sound bad. These came as spontaneously as the haiku I’ve been posting on the NaHaiWriMo wall. There’s an energy that takes over at the site like a hand that holds my wrist as I pause or pose to let the first word dance on the screen. It’s the presence of so many other haiku writers– whose names I recognize from the Shiki kukai and haiku journals even some haijin–that I think itself serves as the prompt and the word, a prop. The experience, though I hopped in only on Day 19, has been exhilarating.
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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jornales 
More on my haiku from “hearts” Sketchbook Haiku Thread
Or when my haiku works as in these…
Editor’s Choice “hearts” Haiku Thread ~ Karina Klesko, US
monitor—
his heart’s dips and coasts
but where is love?
# 73. Alegria Imperial, CA
Comment:
“This is one that steals away the explanations of technology. There is no machine thus far that can record the heart, soul of a human.”
Guest Editor’s Choice “hearts” Haiku Thread ~ Bernard Gieske, US (Dimension of Images, Senses, Feelings)
“Thirty-five Poets from these twelve countries wrote one-hundred-sixty-six poems for the “Hearts” Haiku Thread: Australia, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Finland, India, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Trinidad and Tobago, United States.
I appreciate this opportunity to make these haiku/senryu picks. I often read and see works on this site about which I would like to respond. In making my picks I looked for those haiku that created for me a second or third dimension of images, senses, feelings; due to the choice and arrangement of words: haiku/senryu that do more than just sit there.”
Read this (next one) by Alegria and see if you agree.
strawberries
cut in half—
such hollow hearts
# 65. Alegria Imperial, CA
Comment:
“A delightful picture of strawberries and perhaps a surrounding pleasing aroma. A straight forward picture of halved strawberries. The key word is hollow and destroys the whole picture. This is unexpected and changes the reader’s feelings completely but exemplifies a fact of reality. Sometimes friends don’t prove to be true.”
Editor’s Choice “hearts” Haiku Thread ~ John Daleiden, US (With an introductory poem, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”, Sonnets from The Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
Maternal Love
heartbeat—
her hand on her belly
searching for it
# 71. Alegria Imperial, CA
Comment:
“I have selected these haiku as choice because they represent the heart(s) theme in explicit and unique ways. They also are exemplary haiku, well constructed and meet many of the following attributes of haiku:
• constructed in a fragment and phrase manner; a haiku written in two syntactical parts seperated by a grammatical or punctuation break. See Jane Reichold’s article: Fragment and Phrase Theory;
• uses kireji: written with punctuation or an obvious grammatical break in the syntax of the lines.
• contains 5 7 5 or fewer syllables
• uses the second line a a pivot structure, effectively creating a haiku without resorting to writing an English sentence spread over three lines. Example above: # 123. Bouwe Brouwer, NL
• makes / uses a literary illusion: # 29. Cristina-Monica Moldoveanu, RO
• uses a kigo”
Read the one-hundred sixty-six poems written for the Heart(s) Haiku Thread in Sketchbook Jan-Feb 2011 Issue Vol. 6. (click on it on my blogroll)
April 7, 2011 Posted by alee9 | comment, haiku, poetry | alegria imperial, Bernard Gieske, Daily wage, Editors, haiku, hearts, John Daleiden, jornales, Karina Klesko, Sketchbook | 2 Comments