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Tag: poems

Haiku (and Haiku-like things) for Spring

April 2, 2009 • • 4 Comments
Pipevine Swallowtail
Pipevine Swallowtail

∞

A young oak trembles:
the dying gusts of winter.
Flowers in the grass.

∞

An hour before sunrise,
rain drizzles through the trees.
A wren sings nearby.

∞

Swallows fill the sky,
returning on springtime winds,
far above our kites

∞

Just water on the pond—
the ducks have gone north.

Clouds cross a daytime moon.
Jays work on a nest.

∞

At migration’s end,
a scissor-tailed flycatcher
perches on a wire.

∞

I build my garden
and plan my meals.

The birds watch
and plan theirs.

∞

hailstones
rip through trees
and melt

∞

Spring’s first hummingbird
huddles against the cold.
Waiting for the sun.

—

These are for Read Write Prompt #72: Spring Is Sprung. I’ve been bogged down with other projects (a video, a series of poems, my job) so these are taken from my other blog, a gnarled oak, where I publish haiku and haiku-like things about nature (mostly). I’ve been writing a number of spring-themed poems there so I pulled some to share here. I also cross-post most of these to Twitter, so if you’re into this sort of thing, you can check that out too.

Happy spring!

Spring Flower

Dreams, Like Dew in the Early Morning

March 26, 2009 • • 13 Comments

Dreams, like dew in the early morning,
drip from a shipwreck survivor’s rag.

Each glistening drop a chance, hope
against another day of slow gnawing

thirst.

Dreams are dew in these latitudes—precious, scarce.
To cling to one is to forsake the other.

Staring at the dew collected on his faded rag,
he squeezes it above his mouth.
Each drop a moment’s

relief.

In the blistering afternoon,
dreams of early morning dew
fly off like the shorebirds
he imagined yesterday.

He marvels at each drop,
each perfect liquid globe,
like the one surrounding him,
that only delays

thirst.

In these shimmering drops,
he sees sharks and a noose
tied by his own hand.

Each dream falls due
against the night,
the moon’s reflection,
endless rolling waves

fade
like dreams,

like dew
in the early
morning.

—

This is for Read Write Poem: It’s all about the First Line. The idea was that participants would contribute a line of poetry and then choose someone else’s as the starting point for a poem based on freewriting from the borrowed line.

This was heavily influenced by Jules Verne’s The Survivors of the Chancellor, which I read last week as part of my Lost reading project.

The first line, “Dreams like dew in the early morning” was provided by Sam at thinking cities… Make sure to pay him a visit and read some of his poetry. It’s good stuff.

Miles (Never Once Imagined) – Postal Remix

March 23, 2009 • • Leave a comment

miles-never-once-imagined-r

—

I’d been working on this to submit to Postal Poetry but by the time I finished, I found that they were no longer taking submissions so I offer it here. It’s based on, and is really a remix of, a draft of the poem that I posted with the image about three years ago. I’m still working on the longer version.

It’s disappointing to see Postal Poetry go static, but I found it quite inspiring as I had never thought to combine images and words like this, which is werid considering the time I spend writing and doing photography.

I’ll probably post more of these here as I come up with them. Thanks, Dave and Dana, for the inspiration.

And, in a odd circular kind of way, and with no connection to poetry, the very day that Postal Poetry stops, my old friend Andy starts up his own site, which is about traveling in Texas. Check out Texas Rhodes Trips.

A Springtime Walk

March 19, 2009 • • 5 Comments
Cardinal singing for spring

Every tree along the trail to the pond wears its own cardinal, each claiming territory and attracting mates, filling the air with song. Gnatcatchers and kinglets hop through the branches with the chickadees. Blue Jays build a nest by the pond where the ducks had been until yesterday when they got the migration call and departed for points north. With all the birds alive and calling attention to themselves, the deer skeleton was quite a shock.

on a bed of leaves,
a deer skeleton picked clean,
save one furry hoof

South Austin Chili

March 12, 2009 • • 12 Comments

Black beans, fresh rinsed
obsidian jewels,
drop through fingers
feeling for stones.

Pasilla chiles, toasting,
warm the air. Later,
ground and simmered in oil,
they seethe in a mild lava.

Chocolate softens,
flows into the chili—
an ebony swirl
rippling on a midnight sea.

—

This is for Read Write Poem’s What’s Eating You?.

One of my favorite things to cook is The Soup Peddler’s South Austin Chili recipe in his Slow and Difficult Soups. I like the end result, but I love the process of making this chili. The time spent in the kitchen working the ingredients and listening to music while enjoying a beer as the pasillas toast in the oven is sheer joy.

The chili itself is wonderfully rich with a slow chipotle burn, and with the chocolate added it comes off almost like a mole.

My Other Blog: a gnarled oak

March 10, 2009 • • Leave a comment

I started another blog about a month ago, but kept it under my hat until I had a name for it. The name came this week: a gnarled oak.

It’s from this haiku I wrote last week:

I watched and listened—
a gnarled oak full of stories,
birds turned into words

a gnarled oak is a microblog where I’ll be posting short observational poem-like things mostly about birds and nature.

This started from my experiments with Twitter (you can follow me on Twitter where the gnarled oak stuff is automatically be cross-posted). The notion of posting every moment of one’s life is kind of silly so I just twittered short little poem-things and haiku. I discovered there are a lot of people who do this. Many quite well. I wanted a more personal and simpler space for these besides Twitter, and I discovered Tumblr, a microblogging platform that works nicely for this.

The things I post there are the things that often got written and lost in my paper journals, but after being inspired by a small stone, a handful of stones, The Morning Porch, TWITTERKU, Open Micro, Paiku, Haiku Habits, Full Moon of November, Oversouled and numerous others whose RSS feeds and tweets I’ve been enjoying, I decided to have a go at this style of blogging. Many of these sites are powered by Tumblr and that’s how I found it, so thanks to all of those for inspiring me.

Coyote Mercury is still my main joint, but you’ll find these other bits of writing that seem too small for a “full-size” blog laid out for large images at a gnarled oak where they won’t be overwhelmed and can kind of live by themselves in a simpler region of the blogosphere that lacks sidebars, comments, spam, and upgrades.

Check out a gnarled oak and have a look around. There’s even an rss feed for those who use readers.

Friday Hound Blogging: NaisaiKu III

March 6, 2009 • • 4 Comments

Phoebe Barks

can you call it fun
if no one ever gets hurt?
RED CUTS ON WHITE FUR
if no one ever gets hurt,
can you call it fun?

—

This is for my rough-and-tumble greyhound Phoebe. She’s always got a cut or a scrape or a bloody appendage. It’s all fun and games even when she gets hurt. We’re pretty sure she thinks that’s half the fun.

If you’re interested in the form of the poem, it’s a NaisaiKu and it was written for Week 3 of the NaisaiKu… Challenge.

[saveagrey]

Nycticorax

March 5, 2009 • • 6 Comments

A nycticorax nycticorax brouhahas behind my back,
Monkey swings a question: axes if I’ll take a hack.
Banging fall against my led racks one up for me.
On a wire, freezing fire, spinning tire, unicycle riders flee.
A liar pulls his pants up higher.
Typewriter, scared-of-spiders, aims a little higher:
Could the cold of clouds combine?
Do the roses know the thyme?
This is strange—her thin I thought; you thought it
Too. You know it’s true.

—

This is for read write prompt #68: meaning is optional. Surprisingly enough, it was fun. I tried to write something that sounded interesting and would be fun to read out loud yet with as little meaning as possible. Despite my initial attitude indicated by the words in bold, it was more difficult than I imagined it would be. It also required more thought than I anticipated. Who knew it would take so much time to write something that doesn’t mean anything?

Nycticorax nycticorax is the Latin name for the Black-crowned Night Heron. The literal translation is “night raven.”

Can you find the line from a Cure song that snuck in here slightly altered?