Change comes
And the wind looms
In the late winter sky
How suddenly small and low
The walls around us
A tanka for the changing season
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Tag Archives: mortality
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
Snow, again
Unbidden, it comes all the same
Without malice, unaware and uninterested
In our dreams or desires
Without even innocence
Its promise of sweet seclusion
Sequestered beneath the pale sameness
Dissolving in the salty mired streets
White and gray in a death spiral
A love embrace unlike any
Seen since the last snowfall
What may be, what could be
Belong to the feckless air
Oh, I can dream, all right
But only until recalled
By bickering gulls
Geese barking orders,
Or the shrill outrage of the
Woodpecker’s call
A field mouse trips nervously
Across an ice dam
Vultures patrol the freeway
Food from top to bottom
Interested only in replication
The slaughter of millions
But a byproduct of procreation
So long as enough survive to breed
Or not, and even then,
Some beast waits anxiously in the wings
For just enough change
Just enough opportunity
And still, falls the snow.
Time
We pine not for youth
But for doors once open
Long since shuttered
Each year a nail
Hammered firmly home
A winter quartet
I
Daybreak
Orion long since fled,
The new moon cradles the old,
With Venus, that old voyeuse,
Standing watch,
All the sky ablush
II
Temperatures drop slowly
From the unblue, steel-gray sky,
The promise of snow revoked
In response to some
Imagined slight.
Across the low-slung day,
Footprints.
III
Finally, snow,
Fierce and bitter
No longer willing or able
To hold its rage against
The lingering autumn,
At the tress clinging absurdly
To their dead.
IV
A Sahara of snow,
Windblown and duney,
Bereft only of camels,
Piled like so much longing,
Like so many
Cancelled appointments.
exiles child 