Haiku for a Saturday

Duke of Wellington:
swift arrival announced by
Star Wars at sunrise


stunning summer day
give thanks for the miracles
air conditioning

Responding

You have noticed, no doubt, that I broke my promise to post more poems soon. The big reason for this is that I have been slacking in the writing department. I did spend a little time reading and a lot of time living life, but wasn't it just a few months ago that I wrote a poem every single day? Why can't I even do a seventh as much work?

Well, no more. Naomi Shihab Nye, a poet I admire, has chastened me. In a recent discussion (it's only 3 minutes long to watch, and less than that to read) Nye commented on the importance of not only reading and collecting poetry, but of responding to it--of writing. I've let nearly a month go by without doing either, and I'm getting back on the bandwagon. Verses and voices will be drifting your way.


Though most of the reason I didn't post is that I simply did not give time to writing, part of it is an unwillingness to share what I did manage to get onto paper.

An example is the preceding post "Ten Over." I wrote half of it and stopped, not liking it. It's still not what I would call my best work, but I've reconciled myself to posting it. The problem is not so much with what the poem is, but with what I expected it to be. When I started writing, I had something specific in mind that I wanted to accomplish with the poem, and in the process of writing it the poem became something else entirely. This actually happens more often than not in my writing, that a work grows to become something all its own, in spite of any plans I may have had for it at the outset. Often this is what gives life to the poem, or what saves it from being horribly contrived. I go back and read it again, wondering where all those great images came from.

But other times it is disappointing. I started three poems this month (which tells you that even if I'd finished all of them I would still owe you several posts) but didn't finish any of them in one sitting. What happened to letting the blog be a place for rough drafts and spontaneity? What happened to being confident that hardly anyone reads it anyway, so there's no reason to be embarrassed about anything I post?

I'll see what I can do. Or, more to the point, what the poems can do. You'll be the first to know.

Ten Over

Driving down the interstate again
with leapfrogging corvettes
and sauntering sedans
and one convertible.

Brown and red and green and white,
coupe and bug and pickup truck,
we all have our windows down
to share the rushing wind.

Tapping on the driver's panel door
or on the roof above his head
or coasting careless in the air
left-hand fingers dance.

Cowboy's Blessing

I'm two weeks behind! I'm sorry! Poems on the way in a day or too, I promise.
In the meantime, please enjoy this poem I found printed on someone's door. A diligent google search failed to reveal the author. (That's not to say that nobody knows, just that I couldn't find it in less than seven and a half minutes.)

Cowboy's Blessing
-Anonymous-
May neither drouth, nor rain nor blizzard
Disturb the joy-juice in your gizzard!
And may you camp where wind won't hit you,
where snakes won't bite and bears won't git you!

Ash

Leaking smoke like
a sawed-off shotgun
this smoldering second-half
of a ground-out cigarette
cocked casually from
the pickup's open window.
Gray ash dusts away,
a breeze-blown hourglass,
and the light changes.

Soft

You are that soft strength, my sea anchor--
not plunged into the sand, a sullen sodden rope pulled taught
across a widening gulf between us--no,
you are that gentle weight at my back, moving with me
yet holding me so that I do not drift,
making me more solid through both waves and wind at once,
and I'm always circling back to you.

The strength of rain: a current coursing ever earthward,
more insistent in its flow than any Nile
or Mississippi as they wind and wend their way to sea.
And yet the rain is careful, soft,
tapping tip-toed to the ground small drop by dainty drop.
And how much more does soil love
the rain than any river's flow? How much more strength
than streams does rain endow?
And what but its sweet fall could form the softness of a rainbow?

Matched

There is tragedy in the arithmetic of Wednesday afternoons.
Two by two they're matched, then paired
and placed in a warm embrace to rest softly, together.
But left behind, with the dryer sheet, these three:

one whose double has been missing, adventuring somewhere
in unknown jungles for forgotten months;

two that nearly match, but not quite,
and so are only worn when all others have been chosen--
held in reserve until no one else is left,
but singly, no folding together so that they
will have someone to hold on to in the quiet dark.