would the moon (an unpublished haiga)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)
day in the park (for Friday Poetically with Brian at OSP)
Crow in Bowen Island, BC
a cat eats weed flowers
my dog sits on the bird bath
mom spreads a picnic basket
for baby’s feeding bottles
three crows swoop in
on my bag of popcorn,
a weed flower sticks
to my dress
baby drools
on her blue bib the sky turns
golden, i gather the crumbs
under the blooming junipers
i pull up a heather, a
squirrel flies over my head
on a twig chippers chatter—
my heather turns blue
baby picks a dandelion
the sun slides down, over skies
a swarm of snowbirds
fly home
Posted with other fun poems by and for children for Friday Poetically with Brian at One Stop Poetry. Check us out!
stillness: water as prompt (haiku from my wall at the NaHaiWriMo site)
1.
stillness–
the lotus the pond
and the sky
2.
rain
on tear-stained cheeks
cleansing over and over
March 30 NahaiWriMo profile (facebook)
Wish you were here!
Today, I’ll be with Vicki McCullough, Jessica Tremblay and Angela Naccarato–we of the Vancouver Haiku Group–and YES, Michael Dylan Welch at Van Dusen Gardens here in Vancouver, BC for the opening of Sakura Japan Days. We have a table for haiku enthusiasts or for those just curious at the Floral Hall. We expect to follow ginko walks with Michael as well as lead some ourselves. He will be on stage for a haiku reading tomorrow. I’ll be there again tomorrow. We also expect to pin on a wall curtain selected haiku we’ve written on Japan.
Wish you were here!
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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