The images in this post are derived from
(where similar reds appear in very different places).
RevolverMaps Widget
Tiny raspberries
twinkle on revolving globe.
No seeds between teeth.
It is late afternoon, so I will get while the getting is good.
Do It Now
Low sun; long shadows.
Take photos before sunset:
twilight summons night.
Spider Rock — ©2012 John Wanserski for Creative Juice LLC
While there are many fine photos of Spider Rock and its shadow, this splendid one by John Wanserski has colors and composition that are distinctive and especially appropriate for my haiku. Click here to buy a print.
Designed and built long before there were supercomputers, the great Gothic cathedrals often developed cracks and bulges.
When more buttressing did not look like it would be enough to avert a catastrophic collapse at Amiens, the engineers there devised a way to get the net effect of putting a really big and really strong hernia support belt around the cathedral walls. Cathedrals don’t wear clothes; how do U hide such a belt? How do U cinch it? How do U accomplish all that with medieval technology?
The answers are sketched in the Wikipedia article on the Amiens Cathedral and visualized in a 2010 NOVA episode on PBS: Building the Great Cathedrals. (To read more detail, look for “iron” in the transcript.) U can blame me for bringing up hernias.
Dunno whether the engineers at Amiens were called ingénieurs at the time; at least one of them should have been called créatif. The cathedral is an enduring monument to the faith of many and the creativity of some, including a few engineers.
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Rules Went Away
!Doorknob meteor shower:
!mundane miracle.
Have U read Alice in Wonderland ? Expecting me to refrain from reworking an initial idea in my wordsmith’s forge is like expecting Alice to refrain from following a white rabbit who looks at a watch and frets about being late. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.
Rules Came Back
!Meteor shower
!seen by day in a doorknob:
!mundane miracle.
Tho originally written in response to a challenge on a blog other than CDHK, the tanka here can also respond to Carpe Diem #1214 dawn because it uses the word dawn and has fragment/phrase structure on 2 levels: between the haiku and the rest of the tanka as well as within the haiku itself.
My tanka responding to a challenge posted by Patrick Jennings is a riff on the splendid photo he provided, with hills that seem to go on forever in both time and space.
Originally posted by Patrick Jennings in
[Evanescent ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #89]:
Seize the Sunrise
Evanescent dawn.
Do hills endure forever?
No, but long enough.
~ ~ ~ ~
Art subverts time with pixels;
the moment also endures.
Slavomir Rawicz planned and led a small group’s escape from a prison camp in the Siberian Gulag in 1941. About 9 months and 3000 miles later, the 4 survivors reached safety in India, having walked (with a little crudely improvised equipment and w/o maps) thru Siberian snow, the Gobi Desert, and high passes in the Himalayas. Details are in his book The Long Walk.
There are many sane and decent people in the USA, and some of them may have the grit and ingenuity of Slavomir Rawicz and his companions. In my own small way, I will try to help and will keep Yogi Berra’s Law in mind.
Having flown my flag inverted (as a protest) for a few days after the electoral disaster of 2016, I put it away. The meaning of inversion would no longer be clear. In the spring of 2017, I bought a new flag (larger and US-made) for occasions like July 4th, when flying the flag upright would not look so much like general approval of the way things are going. Ceding patriotic symbols to bigots and plutocrats would be a tactical error.
Maybe I should be doing other things today, but I came across the new reading of the poem. Despite not having burst mode on my camera, I then lucked into a good snapshot of my flag waving proudly. As usual, I teared up when a radio station played The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Tonight, I will both smile and yawn when neighborhood fireworks keep me up late. Tomorrow, the sane and decent people can return to the work of redeeming the promise of this day.
Seen in Spring
Kelly green moss on
rocks near the clear quiet stream
with water striders
Heralds in the Sky
Flying clouds reveal
unseen wind above limp sails.
The crew dares to hope.
My haiku in response to Ghosts ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #92 is third in a trilogy that began with 2 in the original version of a previous post.
Widower’s Song #3
Ghosts do not haunt me.
Remembered joys can often
overcome regrets.
For sailors on the open sea in the past, to be becalmed was always a hardship and sometimes a disaster, as described in Goethe’s poem Meerestille (or Calm Sea). I got the image and English translation dislayed in this post from a website celebrating German Romantic literature. U can read another English translation of Goethe’s poem here.
My tanka expresses yesterday’s fears in today’s language.
Becalmed in Olden Times
Viking longships moved
with oars pulled by aching arms.
Oarless ships stood still.
Oarless crews waited for wind,
while food and water ran low.
As the photo and poem in the challenge so aptly illustrate, to be becalmed can be a pleasant experience nowadays. Admire the crescent moon and furl the sails. Start the engine and head for home. Be confident of getting there.
My tanka expresses yesterday’s fears in today’s language, lest we forget how high we have climbed and how far we could fall, in technology if not in poetry.
Like the conflict between living in the moment and planning for the future, abstract/concrete (or general/specific) is a conflict that can only be managed, not avoided or resolved. Trying to be 100% one or the other does not work. We must muddle thru, preferably with awareness that what works for one person at one time will not work for all people at all times. This post muddles thru the abstract/concrete conflict with a mostly abstract tanka inspired by excerpts from the mostly concrete poetry in 2 posts by others.
Consider the first of 4 stanzas posted in {underground (20170523)}:
© Crow
i have learned the hard way
that just because something
has been buried does not mean
it’s dead
It could stand alone as a fine short poem. It also inspired the fourth of 7 short stanzas posted (along with an interesting biographical sketch of the 17-th century painter Caravaggio) in {Caravaggio Dreams}:
© Poet Rummager
Do you not see what I’ve buried deep,
has dug itself out to find me?
Maybe it’s because of my math background that I felt these excerpts were more powerful standing alone than in their original contexts, with concrete details about zombie cannibals and Norse gods (Crow) and a dream encounter with Caravaggio (Poet Rummager). While I do prefer cremation to internment and do appreciate Caravaggio’s pioneering of expressive chiaroscuro, I found all those details distracting. I was moved by the quoted stanzas despite what went with them.
One of the virtues of haiku poetry is that there is scant room for anything irrelevant, so I tried putting my takeaway into a haiku. But I found that format a little too restrictive. What happened after whatever was buried deep had dug itself out? My haiku left open the possibility that it might have just toddled happily away, w/o the ominous implications of the first line from Crow’s stanza and the last 3 words from Poet Rummager’s stanza. Wanting my poetry to be forthrightly ominous rather than ambiguous, I extended the abstract haiku to a tanka with (as it happens) concrete imagery in the 2 added lines.
Empty Grave
I buried something
that was not already dead.
It dug itself out.
~ ~ ~ ~
It shook like a wet dog and
followed my scent to find me.
Tho a uniform level of abstraction might be nice, I can live with the muddle. At least in visual art, the distinction between abstract and concrete is somewhat muddled anyway (and not just because of photography).
My photo is 100% serendipitous. Click here to see Cee Neuner’s beautifully colored and composed photo of (assisted?) nonconformity among mums.
Here is a little silliness with self-reference in response to [Diminutive ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #90], which displays a good use of a long word.
Wanting Five
Ah, “diminutive”!
Big word for “tiny” fills out
first line of haiku.
Hmmm. Would anybody want a long synonym for “tiny” in a 5-7-5 haiku? Nah.
BTW, self-reference in language really is a big deal, as explained (among other places) here and here. It has also been joked about in other haiku. Some examples are here and here.
Originally posted by Patrick Jennings in
[Evanescent ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #89]:
Seize the Sunrise
Evanescent dawn.
Do hills endure forever?
No, but long enough.
~ ~ ~ ~
Art subverts time with pixels;
the moment also endures.
© Adjei Agyei-Baah
ancient road…
the trails of the masters
absorbed in fallen leaves
© Mellow Curmudgeon
Footprints fade but insights shine,
lighting the path forward now.
In some ways, a century ago is already ancient. Photography’s pioneers worked with nasty chemicals in darkened rooms to produce grayscale prints. Modern photographers can (and should!) honor them by pressing forward and building on their work in our digital world of colored pixels, using grayscale (or partial desaturation) only as appropriate for specific images.
Stained Glass in Spring
Leaves and seeds glow as
sunlight nourishes new life.
Cathedral window.
Mellow Curmudgeon 