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

Tanka Prose

Fishing for words

Found after decades! Packed away with other favorites of mine, their spines barely affixed, A Child's Garden of Verses (a condensed pop-up edition) and The Golden Book of Poetry … coming back to life. 

I don't know exactly when, or why, my writerly muse first emerged—or where it came from. (But perhaps it was fed by the lines within these very books?) Nor can I explain my inability to hold onto my muse for very long at any given time. Yet even after I've convinced myself it's sailed off for good, I will probably half expect to find it again, waiting for me in some invisible box or misty sea.

Wynken, 

Blynken, and Nod, 

poets three 

in the same wooden shoe 

without their nets of gold

______________

Author's Notes:

— The above tanka is a reference to "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod," Eugene Field, 1889; "misty sea" is from the same poem.        

— The Golden Book of Poetry, various poets (including Field), 1947.

— A Child's Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885.

—Haibun Today, vol. 10, no. 2, June 2016 

I wrote the above tanka, a take on the familiar children's poem, in response to three of us lamenting the then-current loss of our muses. They must have sailed away, on vacation together. Not long before that, I came across the above-mentioned books, so voila, a tanka+prose piece!

How sunflowers

how sunflowers 

could grow taller than me— 

in first grade 

the blurry border 

between fairy tale and fact 

Mariposa, 33, fall 2015

I feel like growing sunflowers. Maybe next summer.

A dollop; grouped by class

a dollop

of clotted cream

on my scone—

the pleasant taste of things

I once avoided

~afternoon tea, cruise ship

grouped by class

while on the Titanic

though just one

set of numbers

for all their gravestones

~Titanic cemetery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

—both of these published in Atlas Poetica, 22, Summer 2015

Tanka Sequence

Homegrown 

for Sandy 

for years 
she couldn't venture 
into the garden— 
there, on the paving stones, 
is where she found him 

resurrecting 
the raised tomato bed 
plant by plant, 
she sinks her fists deep 
into dark compost 

Lily, 
her gardening dog, 
at her side ... 
a bounty of earthworms 
and a small patch of peace  

—Skylark, 3:2, Winter 2015