Children’s voices
Laughing
Squealing
Exclaiming
Surprise
Like orchid petals
Each in a new direction
Each unexpected
At the orchid show
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Category Archives: Poems
Enfant terrible
After reading the October 2013 issue of Poetry.
What vanity is this? Asks the enfant terrible
His latest work selling in the triple digits
I’m not so different from the butcher’s boy
Bloody apron askew, half-smile on his face
Or the preacher’s grace in desperate ascension
The ladder fixed firmly on the gutter’s curb
So hard to tell the weeping from the laughter
At such an angle; let’s call it even
Mr. Joyce, in his second coming, inventifacted words a-flail
Would smile at such sanity, clean as a whistler’s boy
Sheep or swine, it’s all alike; I see it now for no reason
Not so much the parting of the fog as the clarity of it
Curse the winter if you like; it won’t leave
The Stars by which we swear such oaths
But fizzle in the end of all creation
A-twitch with whimsical eternity
A tanka for the changing season
Change comes
And the wind looms
In the late winter sky
How suddenly small and low
The walls around us
1 1/2 haibun
Last night, I awoke from a dream of my childhood, startled to find tears in my eyes. There were the four of us children together, including my long dead brother, second in age, just older than I, and thus relegated to the task of keeping me on the proper path of life, as determined by whatever demons and angels that informed his conscience. In the dream, he was chiding me for some transgression which I have now lost to memory, as happens with dreams. I only know that, when I awoke, I was filled with such a love and tenderness for him as I haven’t felt since he died, many years ago. I got up and looked out the window, at the snow-covered landscape revealed by the light of a streetlamp, and what came to me was the final sentence of James Joyce’s story, The Dead:
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Which in turn put me in mind of the Michael P. Smith song, The Dutchman, especially this verse:
When Amsterdam is golden in the summer,
Margaret brings him breakfast,
She believes him.
He thinks the tulips bloom beneath the snow.
What came out of all this before I went back to bed was a trio of haiku, or, I suppose more accurately, two haiku and one senryu.
The Winter snow
Falls equally
On living and dead
No tulips bloom
Beneath the snow
Only dreams
Heaven and hell
Are but regions of the heart
With contested borders
My Latvia
This far north, Winter
Comes like some uncle,
Dearly loved, but always too early
For supper, and staying into the
Small dark hours, full of tales of
Death and sadness,
And there you are, longing
For the break of Spring
Then Summer comes,
And you rush to embrace her
Like an old sweet regret,
Anxious not to screw things up this time,
And cling too tightly
Until finally, inevitably,
She slips away, again too soon.
And Winter says,
I told you this is how it would be.
exiles child 