A brace of haiku to weave into your dreams.
I.
We are sparrows, you and I,
And all the rest of them, too,
Picking at life’s slab of suet
II.
In the garden
An old man rakes gravel
Leaves oblivious
All these seasons
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Tag Archives: illusion
The word fire
“The word fire,” says Sensei,
“does not burn your lips.”
But say, Sensei, that the word fire
Burns your heart, the heat rising
Through your neck, and, yes,
Singeing your tongue on the way out?
What if the word eagle
Makes you feel like soaring,
All the while tethered to your
Earth-born dreams, that seem only to rise
Slowly?
Or the word dying, though it seems a lie,
Still feels dark and wet, not exactly cold,
But too thick for that?
I think, Sensei, that even your
Ancient schemes cannot touch
These depths.
Your finger points only to a place
Where the moon might have been
So long
…and the sad gypsy sang for his bottle of wine, and I sang along for mine.
-Jose Feliciano
Those days, we were dangerously close to dying,
To the end of all the longing we mistook
For grand poesie.
Lost on the road to anywhere,
We stepped toward no paradise,
Discarded all loving touch
But for human companionship,
Asking too much of the world, unable to grasp
The small treasures.
If there’s something missed, something lost,
It’s only the wide-open sky we saw
Through vinegar eyes,
Our salted wounds as yet unburied.
Come back to me, my own true self,
Come back, and we’ll slip away
To some long, true corner
And watch the setting sun.
Father’s day
I no longer imagine speaking to him
Explaining what I see of life, alert for the slight
Tremor of the eyelid
Some signal, some connection
Once, in a dream, he called me to join him
Held out a crumbling hand
I kicked him away, catching his chest
Exploding with the dust of dying
Hollow as the years of living
I look at an old photograph,
A young officer, impish gleaming eyes,
A girl on either arm
I think we might have come to terms,
The two of us,
But he died somewhere in the old country
Long before his wraith gave me life
Haiku, too
You hear, years later,
The bomb went off after all.
Another drink, you think.
exiles child 