time (one of three haiga at Notes from the Gean, March 2012)

One of three haiga at

Notes from the Gean 3:4 March 2012 (on my blogroll)

 

time

sifting through stones

for inconstancies

 

haiku: alegria imperial, canada

image: eleanor angeles, usa

 

abducted fireflies (haiga7 for 19 Planets Art Blog)

haiga7 for haiga-a-day made with clip art on Microsoft Publisher

abducted fireflies
glowing in its eyes
frog

Another post for Rick Daddario’s haiga-a-day challenge at 19 Planets Art Blog, which I created from a clip art on Microsoft Publisher.

And what’s behind the image of the frog? This…

Noticing what could be unseen or merely imagined, magnifying the significance of what would be otherwise, some speck lost in the swarm of air particulates, this is what poetry, especially haiku, does to me. My mind cannot seem to work within limitations of space and time, or even sensations. What’s beyond a simple object in a single moment becomes a truth that breaks through thought barriers. Take the frog.

Basho has immortalized its break out of anonymity with his famous haiku, ‘old pond’. Reading it again and again, one steps into the monastic peace of an old pond until a frog that one hardly notices among stones, plops, and animates the peace with the sound of water. In a moment, the old pond turns into a universal moment of any moment that once was lifeless, suddenly, breathing from the unexpected.

My haiga is hardly a takeoff from Basho’s frog. It does not have the quietness of it, nor of the objective quality that identifies the poet as the observer but in whose mind, reality is arranged into three lines that total into a truth. While an observation as well, mine is less objective in that I state what I suppose in what I see, namely, the glow in a frog’s eye–seen especially in the dark. Knowing what it feeds on, I imagine fireflies and connect it with that glow. In reality, it is far-fetched as we know that anything creatures eat ends up far from the eyes, in the stomach. If a glow ever shows in the eye, it is that of satisfaction. But what I have done here, or think so, anyway, is tweak reality and made it slide into poetic thought, some other truth.

trimming the tree/winter full moon

1.
trimming the tree–
a cat’s frame
not a star

2.
winter full moon—
the missing napkin ring
beside the Star

–haiku for jornales friends with my wishes for the most of yours during this Christmas season and the new Year!

The lunar eclipse saluted us first, extravagantly, too, and the winter full moon sails on into our wishes among the constellations, sometimes witnessing for us who cannot see stars skidding through Light Years that will never be visible in our time. The secret in our lives is the moment, the moment lived whether fully or not, aware or not.

The moment I just learned on reading an issue of Poetry (December 2006) is thus the essence of all art. Art must not only capture it but live it for us the way we actually do but can’t fathom–in the hugeness of the universe and Time–until an artist does it for us.

You and I, newbie or master, implanted with the seed to let art blossom must take command–do we have a choice? You and I know we don’t have as it has taken over our souls, the deepset recesses of our being even, as I know from lines you generously leave here. Thank you–if I could but reinvent the word!

last winter in fornt of a dressed-up Vancouver Art Gallery when snow defaulted on Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics

now

I like this poem, its rhythm or just the sound of it when I read or recite it. It’s one of those for which I’d write myself a check of $1,000 for my “jornal”. What do you think?

 

now’s a sound, a

                  hacking

in space a rhythmic

splicing

       a phantom hand

scythe upright

in greed

cutting in swaths

—its mode a sharp embrace:

no sweetness

there

 

now’s a push but no

sudden one, instead a

jabbing

in the skull

a stabbing      not for blood

but eternal

jiggling swaggering

a relentless dribbling

of words and water to whet

though never—

that’s how it feeds

 

a pattern scissoring

now is

a space splitting blankness

into ‘then’

and ‘later ‘    bulking up

with what’s decayed

one row what’s nothing

     the other

only now knows

 

a pulse but not

the kind     on which

life hangs

now’s a beat that

threatens a breath

this fragile silk

now snaps in two

once the known       now

the unknown

 

© Copyright 2007 by Alegria Imperial/Published in poetslane, iluko.com