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?
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!
absolved (for One Shot Wednesday)
swallows burst into our crude mornings
their flight staggering on false winds
we gaze aghast
this fractured air birthed on false moonlight
unpredicted
our beggar voice fades into whimpers
fluttering splintered among fallen blossoms
the unabashed camellias bared
a scandal unmasked by a rude sunlight
our bleeding unabated
we slip into the brambles our sobs drowning
in the chatter of winds the river grumbles
about our tears
a sorrow tarnished by ageing stars
sputtering at dawn
a mourning heron ceases lending its grief
we recover our lips on pin drops of sky
the brambles open up for the wind
a chorus of ripples washes our bleeding
steps curl on our tears we rise
white among rhodoras
absolved
Copyright (c) by Alegria Imperial 2011
Posted for One Shot Wednesday at One Stop Poetry, winner of the 2011 Shorty Award for the Arts, the inimitable gathering place of poets and artists where they share their love for their art while nurturing each other. Come join us!
Go ahead, despair in the tropics (for One Shot Wednesday)
Go ahead, pine away among the palms
throw up your sobs: the leaves will heave up
build you a dome to trap your regrets.
Turn away from the sun. Step on your shadow.
Summer has died on the sand at your feet.
Go ahead, let your humid sorrow seethe.
Thrash the frangipanis screaming red. Go ahead
smash the brashness: your heart will not stand
bleeding itself crimson it has you steeped.
Go ahead, gather the remnants of the soul you bared
the blossom you loved was a strange flower
the morning dew bred into a sleuth.
Let go the dreams stolen then tossed,
rivers will swell on banks spewing scraps.
Go ahead, rake in the shreds if you can.
Go ahead, scrape the hurt, wring it dry
no weeping lasts until noon. Tears cannot
stand the sun; it singes wet wounds.
The sun soon descends to a breeze waiting,
your shadow slips behind you when
you rise again. Look back then: the sun
you loved is only copper melting.
A song that plays on internal rhyme posted for One Shot Wednesday at One Stop Poetry, the inimitable gathering of poets and artists who love their art and love sharing them, nurturing both theirs and of others. Check us out.
tsunami (a haibun draft)
What else but a surreal image? That’s how sizes and dimensions gape at us when Nature takes on our own nature of maniacal rage. An earthquake and a tsunami, for example, when men are turned into nothing but grit and as equally irritating to be winnowed out–if only Nature were like our eyes and hands that miss the tears along with the grit and spare some in prayer.
But sizes do not end where our span points midair or our eyes on walls of horizons. Dimensions spawn spaces blank beyond our knowing. What births in such depths and heights? Men have invented words to describe their fear. They brew these in inner cauldrons but fail to empty them out onto sand.
The steam scalds them at times, the overboil sometimes burns them. But dimensions distract them as they control what’s unseen, what heals, what’s scarred and soothed with words.
Beware do not build on an earthquake fault. As if the fissures may not crack elswhere. Leave the lush volcanic soil. As if men’s hankering for paradise can be tamped down. Live each day as if night were true death. As if, as if deafness can resist the moon’s whispers. Sizes and dimensions on sand only children can fathom turn out to be the truest picture. But even with a heart like a child’s men loses in his tangled thoughts a vision of sizes and dimensions, hence,
towers of sand
suspending stars and sky–
then come billows
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.
mementoes (when my haiku mutate into free verse)
through shedding arcs
up the sand hill down the slide
i make a short cut to my wedding
my veil tangled in a hail
of magnolia endings
six heads bob over the hedge but
a man selling balloons i pull up
a picture the sun
fades in my hand my ring turns
blue in autumn rain
i gawk on my mud-soaked feet
pigeons i startle whoosh up
spray the sky
as seagulls prancing stomp
on my impaled shadow
on my wall i let go of daylight
on the window ledge
my cabbage roses wilt
on leaf tips I glimpse my tears
dripping from my shredded heart
tears
I wrote this poem during one of those moments when feelings and reality crunch into images that in turn transform into words. It’s a favorite among those who have read it where I posted it a few months ago. Because readers like it, I give myself a ‘jornal’ of another $800.
crystal drops said to ease
a heart dammed with regrets
bitter drops known as balm
for a seared spirit no kiss
could soothe could heal
salty drips on lips
cracked with sadness
the dryness of a drought
absence of rain
has not caused
droplets but not dew
in the morning
a spark to tease
a blinded heart
modified from posting in iluko.com
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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