the elusive scent

Poetry 2 Comments

I don’t write as many tanka as I’d like to, or to be more accurate, I don’t often try to publish the ones I do write, since I feel less at home writing in this genre than in writing haiku. But the added incentive of submitting to Moonbathing, a print journal edited by Pamela Babusci, keeps me writing and submitting at least twice a year, for the honor of having my tanka appear alongside those of many of my favorite tanka poets.

the elusive scent
of wild sage and eucalyptus
walking
in the footsteps
of my younger self

yielding

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I’m pleased to have a couple of haiku in the June issue of A Hundred Gourds. In keeping with their policy of not reposting our works for a period of 40 days after they are first published in AHG, I will post my haiku from the March issue instead.

winter solitude
the click of my fingers
on the keyboard

yielding
to a sudden impulse
butterfly in the wind

end of summer
the dog’s bully stick
chewed down to a nub



cherry blossom petals

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Back in February, I saw a notice that haiku about blossoms were wanted for “Haiku for Hope”, an art exhibit that was raising funds for a cancer hospital back east. Few causes are nearer or dearer to my heart, and so I sent along a couple of my haiku that had received Honorable Mentions in the latest Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival.

I am pleased to have one haiku selected to be matched with a photograph, and that the exhibition is viewable online, through an article in The Baltimore Sun. It made it even more special that I know two of the other haiku poets whose haiku were also selected: Roberta Beary and Charlotte Digregorio. Proceeds from this art show go towards Howard County General Hospital’s Claudia Mayer Cancer Resource Center.

cherry blossom petals
this quiet hour
before dawn

Counting

Poetry 6 Comments

Counting

“Did you know a plane flies over your house every seven minutes?” Dad asks. I didn’t know that. Dad is checking his watch again. “There goes another one,” he says triumphantly. I check my watch. He’s right. It has been exactly seven minutes. Dad likes to measure things. He was a scientist, before he retired. He taught me how to measure my pulse, how many steps to take before letting the kite string out, and how to count the gap between lightning and thunder. In his world, everything is precise and orderly. The hospice nurse says he has six months or less to live. That’s a lot of airplanes.

deepening twilight…
one by one
stars appear

Contemporary Haibun, Volume 14