Again the crows

again the crows

after the winds blow through

………….voices

familiar to us

on wings of daylight

—Skylark, 4:1, Summer 2016

How light; futile to try

how light

can resculpt a face

… if for one day

I could be everyone

I've been loath to like




—Ribbons (runner-up, Tanka Café, "Changing the World"), Fall 2015


Thanks to poet James Chessing for his insightful comments in the Tanka Café feature of the Winter 2016 issue of Ribbons, the Tanka Society of America journal. The above poem is mine. But congratulations to Joyce S. Greene for her winning Café poem, included below with her permission. FYI, for each issue of Ribbons, members are invited to submit tanka on a specific new theme. The winner from the previous issue makes the selections.

futile to try
to change the world
I can't change myself
all my vows to worry less
and chuckle more, forgotten

~Joyce S. Greene
—Ribbons (winner, Tanka Café, "Changing the World"), Fall 2015

On my knees

on my knees 
in a forest of weeds ... 
through the night 
the chatter of small things 
I rip from my life

—Eucalypt, 20, Spring 2016 (Distinctive Scribblings award)

Many thanks to Jenny Ward Angyal for selecting my tanka but especially for her beautiful, thoughtful appraisal, a work of art in its own right. 

Tanka Prose

Happy this tanka+prose piece was picked up for reprint in the current issue of red lights. I assumed I had posted "Circa" to twigs&stones earlier (two or three years ago), but I guess I didn't. So here it is:

Circa 1830

For me, it's the most memorable of all the cultural artifacts in the mission's collection. The lacy, shawled garment has a flamenco flavor to it. Sequins, which would have been expensive in that day, further adorn it.

no flash allowed

inside this museum

the blackness

of a widow's wedding gown

preserved behind glass

I read the small sign posted nearby and learn that, according to Spanish social custom, white wasn't an option for widows who remarried. (In fact, I later determine that widows were to wear black for the rest of their lives.) I can't help wondering if there were any particular dictates for widowers.

—first published in Haibun Today, December 2013