Category: Writing

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NaHaiWriMo

NaHaiWriMo – National Haiku Writers Month — the shortest month of the year, for the shortest form of poetry. I learned this from A Woodland Rose, who is writing a haiku every day in February.  A Woodland Rose and I connected through my Twin Sistah (no, I don’t have a twin, this is a friend and colleague who shares the same birthday as me and who has such an enthusiastic embrace of life and the path of feminist justice that she calls her colleagues in the movement to end violence against women, the movement for greater peace and centered awareness in the world, “sistahs!”, thus we are Twin Sistahs) who directed A Woodland Rose to my blog.  So we’re BloHaiSis’s, or Blogging Haiku Sistahs.  Today’s NaHaiWriMo entry:

Early grey softens
Ice cushioning running feet
Spinning globe turns south.

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Nest

All week I have been thinking about this nest.  It’s in the Korean Lilac bush planted next to the walkway into the house.  The top branches are sticking up through the deep snow packed on either side of the narrow path we’ve kept shoveled through this snowy winter, and there among the jumble of bush is this tiny nest.  My guess is sparrows built it, based on their fluttering in and out of the bush last summer.  The memory of last summer’s birds and this nest now make me think of the summer after Eric died, when there was a nest in the yews that border the driveway.  I spent many hours that summer sitting on the porch, watching the adult sparrows and listening to the chirping of the chicks and the frenetic squabble when one of the parents would fly into the yew branches and disappear.  A few times I pulled back the branches to see the scraggly feathered heads stretching up towards whatever was coming.  Then the sparrow traffic stopped and the nest was empty.

I’ve been meaning to take a photograph of this nest every day this week, and then write a haiku.  But it’s been a week when taking a moment to stop and snap a picture has felt impossible, one of those weeks when breathing feels like it takes too much time.  I’ve had early morning meetings and evening meetings, meetings after meetings after meetings, which means I can’t get any work done, much less pay attention to the creative channel in my brain.  The whole idea of a haiku a day was to have at least a few syllables of space and time in my brain for creativity.

Well this week the creativity channel has been blocked.  I didn’t get to my poetry group, I only wrote a haiku on Tuesday, and that only happened because the snow sticking to every surface in the outside world was so stunningly gorgeous it stopped me long enough to take a photo and start the haiku machine whirring.

Now it’s Saturday, I’ve stopped long enough to breathe, get some wood into the house so we can have a fire, and think about something other than some work deadline that has to be met in the next minute.  On today’s list is loading wood into the barn, digging it out of the drifts and plowed bank of snow from the last few weeks.  As I carry the wood up onto the porch, through the kitchen, and into the barn I’ll be walking on the shoveled path, right past the nest, hatching its image and metaphor and memories into my brain.  Voila!

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Palindrome Haiku

Syllables forming
Words telling tales telling words
Forming syllables.

I love palindromes. Maybe it’s connected to my fascination with time and movement, how we go from one place to the next, one moment to the next, and can never really go back. Even if we do return to a physical location over and over, it’s never the same because the moment of our return is different from any preceding moment. But with palindromes, you can go both ways. There’s a built in circle, even in a line.

I love palindrome numbers too, like when a digital clock reads 11:11 or 10:10. I was delighted the entire year I was 55 because of the doubling of the digit, the tiny palindrome. One day at work during a staff meeting we were talking about how cool it would be to have a baby on November 11, 2011 — 11/11/11. We even calculated when you would have to get pregnant to try to have a baby on that date.

So, I hope you enjoy my attempt at a palindrome haiku. It’s late, it’s been a long day, a long week (it’s only Tuesday!), a long month, you get the idea. When I have more brain power I’m going to try a more fully realized palindrome haiku. It would be a tiny exercise for trying a crown sonnet some day (15 sonnets, exploring a theme, with each of the first 14 sonnets linked by having the final line of each be the first line of the next sonnet, and the 15th and final sonnet being made up of the first lines of the preceding 14 sonnets in order).

Here are some word phrase palindromes, I found at Wikipedia. “Fall leaves after leaves fall”, “You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?”, “First Ladies rule the State and state the rule: ladies first” and “Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, sees boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl”. The crown sonnet of palindromes may be a character by character and word by word palindrome – “Level, madam, level!”

What about a palindrome crown sonnet?

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Syllables of Time

Two weeks ago David and I went to the opening of a show of Catherine Tuttle’s paintings at McGowan’s Art Gallery.  The paintings were vividly interpreted landscapes of the White Mountains, seen from a hiker’s perspective.  A few of our hiking friends were also at the opening, and we had fun showing each other which paintings we’d love to own, to have a favorite view at home with us all the time.  David’s friend Bob, another painter, was also at the opening, and the three of us were talking about establishing a practice of art.

“I’m painting every day,” Bob said.

“I’ve started writing a haiku every day,” I said.  “It’s a way to have at least 17 syllables of time a day that isn’t about working.”

“Why did you say syllables of time?” Bob asked.  “Why would you say time?”

“Because that’s how I think of it,” I answered.  Bob talked about a recent book by a local author, Turn and Jump: How Time and Place Fell Apart.  Bob had read the book and its essays on how time and place were closely connected in the past, when small towns set their own pace by the rising and falling of the sun, before the frenetic calculation of every minute of most days by schedules and appointments and things that have to be done right now.  I’ve been exploring the theme of time in my poetry for decades, and have an entire manuscript of poems that is mostly a mediation on time, physics, and the immutable laws of the physical world that underlie the mystery of consciousness.  Where does time exist?  It can’t be measured, but we all experience its passing.  It has no physical dimension, but controls how we move through our day every day.  Just the word move implies time, as any change in physical location, awareness, feeling, consciousness, anything, requires the passage of time to be perceived.  Something is one way or in one place, and then it’s not.  That takes time.

“I think part of being retired,” Bob said, and he is, “is reconnecting time and place.”  I need to read that book.  Today’s Haiku:

Dark morning, dark day
Rain stripping the last brown oaks
Syllables of time.