Chen-ou Liu & Mary Ahearn: Wednesday Haiku, #143

Photo by Nicholas T

 

first hometown visit:
I embrace the oak tree
gone years ago

Chen-ou Liu

Photo by Simon Kozhin

 
                    butterfly
               folds its wings
     the prayer the children learn

Mary Ahearn

Woodcut by Shibata Zeshin

the home village
I abandoned...
cherry trees in bloom

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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Cloudy: Issa's Sunday Service, #182

Photo by Piccolo Namek

   

Autumn - that time of the year when this classic song by Paul Simon, performed by Simon and Garfunkel, comes to mind. Slight breezes and strong winds, beautiful clouds flying by. 

For the composer, thoughts echo and swell, from Tolstoy to Tinker Bell ... which gives Cloudy it's litrock cred and beautiful resonance. 

Cloudy

Cloudy
The sky is gray and white and cloudy,
Sometimes I think it's hanging down on me.
And it's a hitchhike a hundred miles.
I'm a rag-a-muffin child.
Pointed finger-painted smile.
I left my shadow waiting down the road for me a while.

Cloudy
My thoughts are scattered and they're cloudy,
They have no borders, no boundaries.
They echo and they swell
From Tolstoy to Tinker Bell.
Down from Berkeley to Carmel.
Got some pictures in my pocket and a lot of time to kill.

Hey sunshine
I haven't seen you in a long time.
Why don't you show your face and bend my mind?
These clouds stick to the sky
Like floating questions, why?
And they linger there to die.
They don't know where they are going, and, my friend, neither do I.

Cloudy,
Cloudy.

And where there is autumn, can winter be far behind. Here's another Paul Simon number, performed live by the scintillating band, The Bangles. Though it doesn't make the list of litrock songs, it sure makes a fine, rocking companion piece:

 

   

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Photo by Davenbelle

blossoms become clouds--
people become
smoke

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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Hubert Hix & Eric Burke: Wednesday Haiku, #142

Photo by Aaron Ansarov (US Navy)

Tonight: Lightning.
Vietnam no longer
40 years ago.

Hubert Hix

 

 Image by Stefan 506

on the logic gate
a loop
of homemade rope

Eric Burke

 Photo via wikiHow

in wooden clogs
crossing a narrow rope...
with parasol

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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L. A. Davidson: these few blocks - Small Press Saturday

L. A. Davidson was a poet whose work I have admired through the years. In fact, her's may have been among the first western haiku I encountered. Below are a handful of poems from these few blocks: a posthumous collection, published in the red moon press postscripts series (volume 6).

Color and tactility, shape and suggestion are hallmarks of this fine work. The poems are deeply meditative, certainly for the poet and most certainly for the perceptive reader. Copies are still available for $7 from red moon.

This is the way every poet would like to be remembered.


On the gray church wall
  the shadow of a candle
     . . . shadow of its smoke

adobe courtyard
the color of red dirt
    sifting into it

On Kleenex
used to remove a moth,
the gray dust.

an old farmstead
bought for investment;
the wild columbine

winter morning
without leaf or flower
the shape of the tree 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Photo by Bill Nicholls

a person-shaped
hole beckons...
deutzia blossoms

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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Charishma Navneet Gupta & Mike Andrelczyk: Wednesday Haiku, #141

Photo from The Center for Disease Control

yoga class -
a mosquito stretches
on my knee

Charishma Navneet Gupta

 
 

Photo by Louise Docker

voices
the water drops from the
flower petals

Mike Andrelczyk

 Sweet Sake House by Kobayashi Kiyochika

knees smelling of sake
taste just fine...
mosquitoes

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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Lou Reed: Things Even Out - Issa's Sunday Service

There's a bit of magic
In everything 
And a bit of loss
To even things out

~ Lou Reed

The Last Interview

  Nine Songs by Lou Reed

from The East Hampton Star
 

"To our neighbors:

What a beautiful fall! Everything shimmering and golden and all that incredible soft light. Water surrounding us.

Lou and I have spent a lot of time here in the past few years, and even though we’re city people this is our spiritual home.

Last week I promised Lou to get him out of the hospital and come home to Springs. And we made it!

Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.

Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us."

— Laurie Anderson
his loving wife and eternal friend

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

to saintly eyes
they are bodhisattvas...
cherry blossoms

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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Kala Ramesh & K. Ramesh: Wednesday Haiku, #140

Photo by Demi-Brooke

scrambling for words -
a birdsong in flight
deep in me

Kala Ramesh

 

Antique Pain Relief Balm

scent of a pain balm
in the railway station...
memories of my father

     K. Ramesh

 Bird Over Poppies by Sugakudo

words
are a waste of time...
poppies

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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Picture for a Sunday Afternoon: Ginsberg, McCartney, Glass

Photo by Adam Jones
 

A little reminder, from friend Rita Cummings, that the faces change, but the message is the same ... 

~~~~~~~~~~~

Photo by Jason A. Samfield

to enlightened eyes
Buddha's bones?
dewdrops in the grass

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 181 songs

apology moon: Cherie Hunter Day - Small Press Friday (the Saturday Edition)

Reading is, in a sense, a communion with self.

Cherie Hunter Day is a fine tanka and haiku poet whose work I always enjoy reading precisely because I find myself going inward to search out both completion and meaning: completion of the work at hand, as some of the finest haiku let a reader's experience temper the direction of the work, and meaning, in the looking inward sense, where a spark is set off by the friction of haiku's traditionally disparate elements.  

Her new collection, apology moon, from red moon press, is contemplative in the best senses of the word, as in searching, understanding, and revealing.

The first poem is a moment perfectly realized, grammatically
 

looking up
rules of punctuation —
green hills

and otherwise. This is truly a poem the reader completes. At first, it seems as though it might be a glib, throwaway image, but the longer one thinks, the deeper one goes.

There are other rules beyond grammar.

insomnia
two parts doubt
one part moon

We've all had this experience, at least those who have a conscience, and perhaps even those who don't. Though the phrasing is so precise as to be almost aphoristic, ultimately what emanates from these lines is truth, truth and nature.

azaleas as afterthought as afterword

What might this be about, eh? Again, there is almost a glibness here. In addition, I had to go back and read the last word more than once because I found myself saying in my mind "afterwards." The persistence of this mistake is, I think, significant, adding a possible 6th word to a 5 word poem that has something of a short story quality about it.

And something more.

cranial sutures
the continents no longer
fit together

Telescoping is one of the most effective techniques the purveyor of the brief form can use - from the particular to the universal, 3/5ths of a mile in 10 seconds. There is an ominous quality on both levels, or threads, of this ku, and, in a sense, a soothing one, too.

before us the wind inside milkweed

Before can mean so many things, can it not? And, yes, there might be another touch of telescoping here because, with the wind and the milkweed, there might just be a sort of chicken and the egg conundrum.

And then there is the literal - what the wind does with seed pods.  

middle age I believe the azaleas pink lies

Might this not be chapter two, or part two, of the "short story" noted above? I can imagine that, somewhere between afterthought and afterword (and right around afterwards), is the middle age revelation of deceit. 

But surely this is a reader bringing her interpretation? What has this to do with these poems? 

Completion, perhaps.

red woods —
the tour bus
waits for us

Time has put its stamp all over this poem - take away for the tourist is revelation ... if you want it.

hot flash
all of the lily pads
touching

If you've never had a hot flash, boyfriend, certainly you could pass on this. But if you have, you know truth.

salt wind ripples on an inner lake

Here is dovetailing or telescoping or whatever you want to label it, used to perfection to illustrate, among other things (i.e. like its point), the relevance and power of the monostitch as an important contemporary form.

donating
my son's cello —
red leaves in the wind 

There are so many possibilities in this particular ku I'll leave it to you, reader, to finish it as you will.

red moon press continues to put out some of the most outstanding volumes of haiku being published today. Grab a copy of apology moon, a little small press gem. It will light up your autumn evening sky.

~~~~~~~ 

 Artwork by Kōrin Ogata

spring rain--
thatched with azaleas
the doghouse 

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 181 songs