At DailyHaiku’s Cycle 14 November round, my haiku

                

November 25, 2012

carapace

the strand of emptiness

i tuck away 

                                                                                              

November 26, 2012

chill

a brick tile

cuts

across clouds  

                                                                                      

November 27, 2012

late night special

the postman rings

                                                                                                    a broken bell 

                                                                                              November 28, 2012

summing up the stars fallen leaves

 

November 29, 2012

cloud shapes

the turns we make

                                                                                                          in secret

November 30, 2012

tideline

the calculated risks

of dreaming

                                                                                                

                                                                                                December 01, 2012

because it’s your turn

autumn rain

                                        

                                                                                               

Please pardon the imperfect layout. It’s actually perfect in the editing page but somehow, when the post comes out, some lines go astray. I’ve been working on it for the last three hours but it just wouldn’t straighten out. Must be a trickster at play…it’s the first time I just can’t figure out what’s wrong. I hope you’ll read the haiku and enjoy them instead,  while glossing over the dancing lines. Thanks again for following jornales!                                                                                             

 (Artwork is mine, created in my iPod with doodoo)                                    

 

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unfinished tales (for One Shoot Sunday)

photo prompt by Neil Alexander

at nightfall
a herded flock of sheep bearing
flasks of prayers
bleat on their steps
toward the temple

in the distance
crows scream for mercy
the broken tower
unleashes bats sniggering
at the sheep

in the darkness
the owl hoots at a pregnant moon
who smiles at shrinking Mars
the stars in his court simpering
conspire with the moon

in the thorny bushes
men braid their way into the night
on their heads their gifts
wobble like heads of wearied gods
once revered

seething fireflies their pin eyes
darting among snoring bees
beguile the men
who mesmerized by the light
melt on their knees

spirits splatter
on yesterday’s thorns turned
night embers burning the temple
far off where prayers thicken
barnacled walls

Dawn fans the dying
souls of the moaning sheep
and the whimpering men
the bats coat the temple tower
with their leavings

on the altar awaiting gifts
the gods disentangle
their limbs but leave their hearts
to morning worshippers
hankering for unfinished tales

Posted for One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry, the gathering place that has been the most fertile ground for my poetry where among the most talented poets and artists whose invaluable nurturing caused me to wildly bloom. I thank Adam, Chris G, Claudia, Pete and Brian’s endless unfailing smiles who are leaving OSP and especially Joy and Jenne, goddesses of the lyrical realm for me, for my growth. Thanks especially for the Sunday page, Chris and Adam, these have driven me to work on original pieces I could never have written. It has been for me a blast of 28 weeks and as you had promised Adam, Chris, Claudia and Brian, I hope to meet you again or please seek me out when you are orbiting in the spheres again! I really can’t thank your enough for your support and uplifting words about each poem I’ve written for OSP.

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!

meanings on walls (for One Shoot Sunday)

graffiti in the Lansing area, Michigan, photo by Chris Galford

1. squiggles

your words mere
squiggles on walls
if but smiles
on dry leaves–
when clouds take over the sun
the butterfly dies

2. waves

on the wall
waves splatter a froth
the sky sheds–
is it rain?
our hand carvings on sea air
but the mindless moon

3. sky

we sip dreams
no one knows of what–
were it earth
it would roll
drums beating down on our sky
to give up the stars

4. ripple

heat seeps off
tips of lanceolate
promises
disguised flames–
in the waters a ripple
once a breath twice life

5. blue fish

ocean lure–
we dig for stone fists
to ripple
the silence
a blue fish whispers to me
a broken flower

Copyright © by Alegria Imperial 2011

Five ‘haiku-induced’ shadorma, a Spanish sestet or 6-line poetic form in 3/5/3/3/7/5 syllables per line–my first attempt at it–in response to the Picture Photo Prompt Sunday (One Shoot Sunday) from photos of Chris Galford of graffit’d walls around the Lansing area in Michigan and posted at One Stop Poetry, the inimitable gathering place for poets and artists. Check us out!

a romance diary (a haibun experiment) for One Shot Wednesday

…grey dense skies barring the sun again, chilly on bare skin, spring refusing to leave so much so that even the leafing maple shading the terrace has browned with curled edges in spots, mistaking the air has retracted to autumn, perhaps? Even Nature seems dazed but I’m clear about this memory

spring’s end–
the squirrel flies a trapeze
as we cuddle

…amazing how the sun weakens on spring air yet its sparks illumine all else as in this thought filled in

a weak sun
glitters on spider web–
vacant corners

…even main street breathing unevenly at night has ceased in its restlessness as if the air has suffused all else to a quiet that for me opens up to reach out if it were but a soft turn in sleep when

mute stars–
spaces in between them
open up for whispers

…the night has bounced back in restlessness from a momentary calm which lulled me earlier in a dreamless space but awake now, recalling nights when I would feel lost, feeling an empty space on your side of the bed, but only briefly as you slip back in to turn back

the night
but for the darkness
our roost

…perhaps because they have built their nests, the birds seem to sing a different tune, refrains that rise this morning over the distant grumbling of jets flying off as I compose our song for another day

waning spring–
the wind rearranges petals
tightening us together

An edited version of an earlier post for One Shot Wednesday at One Stop Poetry, the only gathering place that brings poets and artists to share their art freely, comfortably, and joyfully and nurture each other. Check us out!

mid-Manhattan (from memory for one shoot Sunday)

photo prompt by Scott Wyden

a sun tracing its autumn route
never seen here
no shadow falls from slants of light
columns of smoke
the weeping in tunnels
the grating of steel cogs

here only the dream of skies
on narrow slits a canopy propped up
by concrete, glass and steel
needles piercing the day moon
blinking at humans
dogs and cars–toys of King Kong

sunset grinds
a maddening ruckus:
cars rushing as if to escape
people shaken
along with a colony of ants
deadened by the rasp of wheels

blasting horns wheezing air brakes
a wailing ambulance
in a duet with a fire truck
and police cars
in a rush to save a kitten on a terrace
hanging by its paws

the swarm on sidewalks
darkens with dusk
a flowing mush of bodies wrapped
in thick armors of invisibility –
black coat, jacket, cape, cap, boots,
and square-toed shoes

here, no unhurried strides
heads don’t turn
lost in inner spaces
no one misses who gets snared
and stalls: the throng belches on
eyes riveted to warning lights

“Don’t Walk” the wound up toys
stop “Walk” and do
I am lost here
I shed my name I wonder
about the color of my hair
the hue of my skin

I have turned mute
“I’m sorry,” I lisp
as if I really am
sorry about a slice of sky
the undertow that pulls me
to surrender

to the winking stars

Copyright (c) by Alegria Imperial 2011

A poem written from memory prompted by a photo of Scott Wyden posted for One Shoot Sunday for an absolute challenge at One Stop Poetry, th inimitable gathering place for poets and artists. Check out the other poets’ take! Click on OSP on my blogroll.

zenith at noon (for One Shoot Sunday)

Photo prompt by Fee Easton

rain combs the strands
of our adagios:

expanse of thoughts
farther than the ends of flights
wings aching for home
a sight among stars

we tread the waves
sink in whirlpools deeper
than the heart of the flower
a hummingbird chooses

lighter
than marrow-less limbs
skimming skies
bending the spheres

constellations pirouette
on mid-strains cresting to slope
to skid onto silken lilies
our bed of seasons

in our clasped hands
the sea regurgitates the sun
froth fizzes a tickle
on our kissing toes

the sea breeze binds horizons
our eyes delude a sunset
our dawns begin
the night

the zenith at noon
the depth of our dreaming

Copyright (c) by Alegria Imperial 2011

From a photo prompt by Fee Easton this poem is posted for One Shoot Sunday yet another challenge at One Stop Poetry, the inimitable gathering place of poets and artists, winner of the 2011 Shorty Awards for the Arts. Come join us. Share your love for your art. Be thrilled over what others say and what you discover of others’ works.

stars (in a series of 3 haiku each also posted at the NaHaiWriMo site)

field of galalxies taken by Hubble ultra deep field courtesy of wikicommons

1.
pine strands
holding up the night sky—
how low can stars fall?

2.
moonless night—
my sky more punctured
than the last

3.
morning after
on campfire embers
remnants of stars

4.
sky patterns
on nibbled leaves
the Milky Way

5.
stars
digging into sand dunes—
our secrets

6.
forecast—
in and out of clouds
the constellations

7.
stars
through budding oaks—
he counts his lies

8.
paper moon
adrift among stars—
lost in the past

9.
Venus—
her icy sparkle
night and day

…from a prompt by Cara Hollman at the NaHaiWriMo facebook site. I love stars. As a child it must have been all I did when I got weary-eyed reading under a gas lamp or struggling through arithmetic assignments.

Both houses of my grandmothers I grew up in in northermost region of the Philippine archipelago had balconies with a rocking chair–one was a huge Viennese wicker in what must have been white, the other some kind of hard wood with carved head rest and arms where my mother spent rocking through the night, cradling my sister who wouldn’t sleep otherwise. I used to scan the night sky on the top of the stairs on those balconies but my first shooting star I caught not on any of those nights but once on vacation at Angeles Estates that I had posted here as a haibun.

Here in Vancouver on my evening walks–I love the fading light and the shadows–I hardly look at my steps but instead, follow trails in the sky; if it’s cloudy, I search for breaks or imagine ‘chattering stars and recalcitrant stars’ behind the clouds.

This series does say of my preoccupation with stars I hope. Perhaps, too, one more reason why my deep connection with the stars is this: my other name is Aurora, another name for Venus waning or the Morning Star.

…recalcitrant stars and what to me is this haiku moment?

soft rain at dusk
on white magnolias–
recalcitrant stars

What to me is this haiku moment? For me, soft rain at dusk transports thoughts into a magical dimension where reality merges with the unseen. The eye then blurs and in a blink opens to a patch of the universe often easily called poetic moment, one that frees the mind of fences or the masonry of reason. In this haiku, I slipped from the real–soft rain on white magnolias and invisible stars on a dense gray sky–to a confrontation with the galaxies. The stars as in all Nature exist as themselves outside of me but I with a universe within me siphon them with my emotions; in this haiku, I imagine them protesting to descend and touch, perhaps, even kiss the oh, so alluring open-faced magnolias. And not them but the rain is made to fall on infinitesimal lips they imprint as crystal beads in the petals. The haiku for me is a collision of beauty and our imperfect desires, which I projected to the stars. Hence, it must end with just that moment, that tension I feel between the stars grumbling over Nature’s laws, my own recalcitrance over my finiteness really.

Posted for One Shot Wednesday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry, a gathering place for poets and artists, winner of the 2011 Shorty Award for the Arts. Check us out.

renegade (for One Shoot Sunday)

Photo prompt by Rosa Frei

the wind ceases soughing
on its own tracks—
a sputtering light sinks
in the dunes burrowing into dark
secrets the sun furrowed
in its grief
he knows

two dromedaries
behind him cast swaying shadows
dancing to ulululations in the vastness
his droning crazes the stars
sand grit hazed—
he craves for endearments

he stumbles on his own fears
the head stone fractures his seeing
night glows on the foot stone
his own finality writ
he gathers his being in his jalabiyya the wind
left flapping

the desert looms around him—
an open wound of cryptic rhythms—
he scrapes his restless darkness
off imprints on the sand
a phantom hisses death
on his mute shababa he staggers on

another wind billows in the desert
another sky arcs over remains
of the sun simmering
on tarnished sand
he looks up
to infinity funneled
in the black and white
of his eyes

the beaten gold of the desert
sizzles out

Copyright (c) by Alegria Imperial

Free verse composed from a photo prompt by Rosa Frei for One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry, a gathering of poets and artists sharing their talents, nurturing each other. Check us out. Bettery yet, come join us.