Category: haibun

flowers, haibun, haiga, humor, photography

Be(e) in the Moment ~ 😉

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon

Learn from the past and
Vertical=003_crop_840x1124

be ready for the future.
Future_crop_blem_rot-flip-rot-rot_crop_840x1081
Live in the present.
Crabapple with Flying Bee_crop.3_blem_840x892

Choosing images to go with the lines of my aphoristic haiku was easy (for the past), serendipitous (for the present), and beset with false starts (for the future).

I remembered one of the photos I took among the ruins of ancient Greek temples at Paestum in the 1970-s.  So stark, so sad, so in the past.  Dwelling on the past would rot the mind.  Learn from it and move on.

The future is fluid, unpredictable, possibly dystopian.  Plan and prepare, but be ready to change plans if an unlikely future unfolds.  (It will.)  I wanted an image that was noncommital but not just blurry.  After several false starts, I took a tight closeup of swirling brushwork in a small painting by an unknown artist, bought decades ago at a charity sale.

Wanting something joyful and ephemeral for the present, I culled some photos of flowering trees taken in 2020.  One jumped out.  The camera catches a bee hovering for a moment where it enhances a larger overall composition.  The admonition to “be in the moment” is like the haiku’s final line and could be tweaked to give this post a title that winks at the final image.

– Gray button (upper left corner) reveals widgets, –
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
4
haibun, haiga, haiku, photography

Eight Years and Counting

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
The year 2020 is not all bad.  Carpe Diem Haiku Kai (which is one of the islands of light in an ocean of darkness) celebrated its eighth anniversary on 2020-10-01.  The fine haiku poet who founded and curates CDHK suggested writing “a nice festive haiku or tanka” for the occasion.
(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

multi-horiz_800x328_Adj_B-25_C+70_S+50

CDHK Celebrates its 8th anniversary – Carpe Diem 1829
Introduction to a new month.

My response salutes the pluralism and progressivism implicit in CDHK.  We can honor and build upon the past w/o being confined by it.

Old Pond & Beyond
|To sing of all that’s
|true and good and beautiful,
|write haiku poems.

JM_2017-10-27_BKR_800x442

1
haibun, haiku, history, humor, photography

Vertical Shoreline

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
How can a shoreline be vertical?  Well, steep cliffs can plunge nearly straight down into the sea.  There may be a cave entrance right at the actual shoreline.  Do we dare enter the cave?  Perhaps (to borrow a few words from Patrick Jennings’ Challenge #220) a beautiful light awaits us there.
(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

Shoreline ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #220

capri-cliffs_crop_840x1048_shrp+41

Is the sea at Capri’s shoreline still as clear now as it was when I was there in 1977?  I hope so.

capri-clear-water_crop_bri-8_bri-25_840x546

While we’re on the subject of clarity, let’s note that it is not clear whether the eponymous goats really did live on ancient Capri.  But it is clear that the island sited precursors of Mar-a-Lago for Imperial Rome’s fat tyrants.

From the outside, the Blue Grotto (Tiberius’ private pool) looks much like the (other?) grotto in my photo.  The view from inside is entirely different.

A cave entrance right at the shoreline can sometimes work magic.

capri-grotto-crop_HDR_bri-32

Blue Grotto (Capri) [edited image]

Capri Shoreline, Long Ago
|Goats traverse cliffs while
|pink whale swims in blue grotto.
|Naked emperor.

10
haibun, haiku, humor, photography

Enemy of My Enemy

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
To a female mosquito, I look like lunch: a big bag of nice warm blood.  So the mosquito is my enemy.  But I also have a friend.  My haiku about their interaction could respond to a prompt for either the friend or the enemy.
(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

Carpe Diem #1762 Mosquitoes …

One day in 2015, I happened to arrange my lunch veggies so as to look a little like a dragonfly, with snow peas as wings.  Hmmm.  Maybe I could pull more veggies from the fridge and make an arrangement that looks a lot like a dragonfly to me.  (No real dragonfly would be fooled.)  This little project reminded me that a dragonfly is the enemy of my enemy, and thus my friend.

Dragonfly_480x481

What’s for Lunch?
|Mosquitoes in flight
|are seen as meat on the hoof
|by a dragonfly.

 

1
haibun, haiga, haiku, humor, philosophy, politics, seasons

Vampire Bunny at a Haiku Party

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
Follow tradition or push the envelope?  Normal or weird?  (Normalcy spiked with weirdness?)  Haiku or senryu?  This crowd does not fret about simplistic dichotomies.  Let’s get some saké and join the party.
– Gray button (upper left corner) reveals widgets, –
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –

Haiku poems often want (and sometimes need) to interact with images or prose, as in haiga or haibun.  Here is a gathering of ten haiku that could stand alone if they had to.  (Some would rather not.)  They have been invited to come here and interact with just each other, while enjoying some good saké (or whatever).

momokawa_crop_vampire-bunny_840x684

Overlay © Incognito – Russian Federation | 123RF Stock Photo

A haiku inspired by an image may or may not speak to readers who have not seen the image.  It’s hard for the writer to make this call objectively.  That’s OK.  As Stephen Jay Gould often told readers of his articles in Natural History, perfect objectivity is a myth anyway.  (The path from my raw data to “facts” that matter to me depends on my cultural baggage and personal experience.)  Rather than pretend that my judgement calls are objective, I try to compensate for my biases.  In particular, some of my haiku were not invited to the party because they might be too dependent on their inspirations to stand alone.  That’s OK too.  Unlike me, they are not compulsively self-reliant.

Like some of the other guests, October was originally posted in a haiga or haibun context.  That’s why the title it wears as a name tag is also a link.  (When a pale yellow background indicates that several such guests arrived together from the same place, only one of them has a link.)  Click on a link to see the guest(s) interact with an image or some prose that adds to the experience of the haiku.

Seen in Spring
|Kelly green moss on
|rocks near the clear quiet stream
|with water striders 
|October
|Bright sun and cool air;
|azure skies and pumpkin pies.
|Leaves fall in glory. 
Who Miscounted?
|This so-called “haiku”
|ignores five-seven-five, so
|it’s not a haiku.
|Deciduous
|Lifeless?  No, leafless.
|Trees hold their breath all winter,
|exhale leaves in spring. 
This is Not Apollo 13
|Is failure an option?
|No, it is a given.
|But we will still try. 
|No Pots of Gold
|Seek ends of rainbows.
|You will not find them? Okay.
|The quest is enough. 
Fiscal Responsibility
|Debts rise; incomes fall.
|Hard times demand bold action:
|tax cuts for the rich! 
|Seize the Breeze
|Helicopter seeds
|fall from maples and travel
|far enough, this once. 
What’s for Lunch?
|Mosquitoes in flight
|are seen as meat on the hoof
|by a dragonfly. 
|Vampire Bunny
|With coprophagy
|as the alternative,
|you might suck blood too. 
6
haibun, haiku, humor, love, serendipity

What Lovers Watch

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
The prose and poetry below respond to a CDHK challenge about love in summer.  At 50 words in total (not counting boilerplate), they could have responded to an earlier challenge in the same series but were not ready in time.  Can’t rush love (or barbecue).
(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

red-rocket

© Betty Shelton | 123RF Stock Photo

Lovers joined the crowd on the beach last night, watching fireworks shot from a barge.  Now they watch the sunset.

lovers+at+sunset

© Dan Hahn

Sunset on the Next Day
|The clouds burn yellow,
|smolder red, and fade to gray.
|The love keeps burning.
|Rockets lit the sky last night;
|more fireworks in bed tonight.

Carpe Diem #1696 Beach Love

Carpe Diem #2019 Summer Love … extreme haibun

1
haibun, haiku, photography

Rainbow Revisited

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
I found a splendid photo to illustrate a haiku about a rainbow in 2016.  Can I use the same photo for the same purpose w/o repeating myself?  Yes.  The photo is a gift that keeps on giving.
(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

Carpe Diem #1410 Rainbow (short-haibun)

In response to an earlier CDHK rainbow prompt, I wrote a haiku and later found a splendid photo to illustrate it (and inspire some haibun prose).  Can I use the same photo here w/o repeating myself?  Yes.  The photo is a gift that keeps on giving; it has inspired a new haiku.

Out of Reach
|Hard fingers rise up,
|trying to grasp soft colors
|as the rainbow fades.

australian-rainbow_350x466

The image used here has been resized from a photo by Randy Olson with a termite mound in the foreground.
Prints can be bought.

Including the post title and credits, the response above has 98 words.

4
haibun, haiku, humor

Sacrum Sutra

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
The [Menu] button (atop the vertical black bar) reveals widgets like the Search box.  Typing just the [Enter] key into the Search box is a way to browse WordPress blogs.

Can a haibun be a sutra?  Is the Kama Sutra anatomically correct?  We will see.

Carpe Diem #1369 Kamala

Climbing the Tree - crop

Climbing the Tree
(cropped)

The sculpted couple embrace, each standing on the left leg while hugging the other with the right leg.  She entrusts some of her weight to his strong stone hand and thigh; he entrusts some of his seed to her willing womb.

They have held their pose for something like a thousand years.  They ignore the admiring gaze of pilgrims who ponder the mysteries of life and love and whether flesh and sinew can hold that pose for anything like a thousand milliseconds.

Climbing the Tree
|She climbs his body
|as a tree that burns with lust
|(and lower-back pain).

7
enlightenment, haibun, haiku, history, photography, seasons

Oh Come, All Fibo-ku

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
An old Xmas lighting tradition defies a darkness worse than long nights.  I honor it with my lights and with a fibo-ku (a haiku using the Fibonacci series rather than 5-7-5 for syllable counts).

My response to

Carpe Diem Weekend-Meditation #10
Fibo-ku winter time

could be called a “fibo-bun” because it is like a haibun but has syllable counts from the Fibonacci sequence in the haiku part.

Several cultures have responded to the long nights of winter with festivals or structures celebrating light at roughly the time of the solstice.  While not quite old enough to have personal memories of Stone Age passage tombs aligned with the sunrise (on a few of the several days that amounted to the solstice with Stone Age time-keeping), I do remember multicolored Hanukkah candles and the cheerful chiaroscuro of multicolored Xmas lights draped over trees and large shrubs.

multi-vert_800x1116
Nowadays I see mostly different kinds of Xmas lights.  Some people set out ugly jumbles of inflated Santas and other symbols of the gifting frenzy; others outline their houses with harshly uniform white lights.  But some still carry forward the old Xmas lighting tradition (with LED-s now).  And the glorious vocal music of Hanukkah and Xmas still transcends the literal meanings of the verses (2 of which inspired my titles here).

Darkness worse than long nights and garish decorations hangs heavy in today’s air.  Maybe this darkness will also recede.  My lights are up.

Yet in the Darkness Shineth
|Red,
|green,
|blue, and
|yellow lights:
|multicultural
|winter solstice celebration
|defies dark tribal hatred to sing of love and light.

multi-square_800x669

– Gray button (upper left corner) reveals widgets, –
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
10
haibun, haiku, humor, photography

Australian Rainbow

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
Randy Olson’s superb photo of a rainbow is both a visual complement to the yearning expressed in the famous Judy Garland song and a great illustration for one of my haiku.  A rainbow is forever out of reach.  And yet …
(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

To illustrate my response to Carpe Diem # 1020 rainbow, I did a quick search that found more fine images of rainbows than I could view in a lifetime.  The image used here jumped out because it has a vertical format, does not need the rainbow to grab me, and hints at a futile yearning.  The termite mound in the foreground looks like a hand trying to grasp the rainbow.

Termites are much too busy building mounds and digesting cellulose to indulge in such yearnings.  Humans are busy too, and many of us have some awareness of the geometric reasons that a rainbow is forever out of reach.  We sometimes yearn anyway.

australian-rainbow_350x466

No Pots of Gold
|Seek ends of rainbows.
|You will not find them? Okay.
|The quest is enough.

The image used here is a photo by Randy Olson that was available at the time of posting as computer desktop wallpaper from National Geographic.

Prints can still be bought.

4
(reblog), enlightenment, haibun, haiku

Invictus in 5-7-5

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
As there is already more than enough grimness in the real world, I usually dislike grim art.  The haiku by Poet Rummager that is effectively reblogged below is one that I admire despite its grimness.

An Escape | Poet Rummager

At her throat, he pressed
The knife and told her to strip
She leaned on the blade

View original post

In response to Carpe Diem Utabukuro #12, I admire Poet Rummager’s haiku for 3 reasons.

  1.  It is so well-crafted.
  2.  It pushes the envelope of haiku subject matter.
  3.  It honors an unflinching spirit, as in William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus.

Whether #1 also applies to my own grim haiku is for others to say; I do have #2 and #3.

Edge of Enlightenment
|Behold the abyss
|without flinching.  If you can,
|then you are at peace.

UrbanAbyss_512845-800x600

© Lucas Surtin

– Gray button (upper left corner) reveals widgets, –
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
9