You, in the mirror,
Winter nipping at your heels,
I swear that’s a smile
Friday haiku 73
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Tag Archives: mortality
A circle, closing
That split
between life and death
is not a border,
but eternity,
not a doorway
to an endless future,
but an escape
from the chains of time,
not a shattering,
but a mending,
not the end of the line,
but a circle,
closing.
Friday haiku 69
Today’s haiku is a senryu.
I want to be the willow
but I am the oak
and the wind is very strong
Gulags
I
He left home suddenly,
Just ahead of the police,
Or the army, whosever day it was
To reach out and torment him.
He left home,
Unread book left open on the couch,
Dishes left unwashed,
Door still open
As if astonished at the turn of events.
He left home
Just ahead of his brother,
Who, running late
Arrived just after the police.
Years later, thinking
Of the gulag,
Thinking of his brother,
He wept, alone,
Longing for the comfort of prison.
II
In the distance,
I see him coming, the stride
Unmistakable, the smile forgiving,
Even at that distance
He carries the ghosts of my ancestors,
The last of a generation
A link to a past unbidden
And yet desperately sought.
We meet in the middle of the bridge
And embrace
“A hundred grams?” he says,
His eyes, guarded but hopeful.
“You’ll buy me a vodka?”
The road moves easily within the fortress skull
One luck-drenched park bench afternoon
while dust drifted in and out of sunbeam
streams eyes closed I dreamed of living
of love-stained moons and lake-bound swoons
and stars so vast so supreme that only
a poor cosmic speck of a remnant spark
unremembered could hope to comprehend it
of the gravity of gravity and all the loose
and hellbound distance between here and now and now
and then the slow sloping dip of the long trip
at a whim an ungrim wager with fate I dreamed
of how in old age our deciduous dreams their bones
still seductive nudge us toward a place arriving
at which we can only look back helpless bemused.
exiles child 