Children need to learn
that paths are slick and rocky,
but some lead to light.
Image © Patrick Jennings
Rocky ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #292
Dancer’s wooden mask:
leather hinges swing open.
Drum throbs; shaman chants.
~ ~ ~ ~
Hinges swing shut as dance ends:
hidden face; revealed spirit.
Photo © Trustees of the British Museum
~ ~ ~ ~
Khan Academy | Transformation Masks
Acorns spread the faith,
and leaves consecrate the world.
Church window, no wall.
Sailing on fall wind,
a flock of droplets migrates.
Each is a small world.
Sailing ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #286
Carpe Diem Haiku Kai … #1850 dried grass
“Dried grass” in the challenge comes from Basho’s last haiku, written as he was dying. My response imagines him rallying to console his grieving companions.
Smooth outer layer.
We see rough inner layer
when the light changes.
~ ~ ~ ~
Layers nest like Russian dolls,
when science shows us atoms.
Layers ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #283
Better Than No Chance at All
Helicopter seed
lands on shiny new asphalt.
No chance to grow here.
I walk away, then go back.
I move it to damp bare dirt.
Slow shutter needed.
Daffodil and tulip share
early morning light.
~ ~ ~ ~
There is enough for us all,
if we take less than we want.
I considered posting my photo wordlessly, with the post’s title as a hint that I have something beyond a nice image in mind. Too subtle. Compulsively explicit, I wrote a haiku. Then I expanded the haiku to a tanka.
I hesitated. The tanka’s last 2 lines might be too preachy. Then I read the Gandhi quote in a great collection of images and quotes: Our Beautiful, Broken World (curated by Mitch Teemley).
Thanks, Mitch. The time for subtlety is long gone.
Sunlit Moment
Mums are good silk fakes.
Rock is real and will outlast
both mums and viewer.
I dithered over whether to respond to
Scale ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #268
with the material above. With small differences in format, it was posted 2020-04-17. Tho usually reluctant to repeat myself, I’ve noticed that bloggers I respect sometimes do repost things they feel are still relevant. I’ve also noticed that 11 months is quite a while on a cyberspace time scale.
Oh well. It’s rare that I settle on a combination of angle and settings that I really like before the light fades or shifts. Seize the moment.
~ Raphael Warnock (newly elected US Senator from Georgia) in his victory speech on 2021-01-05
Arizona Sky
Wings gliding past arc,
high above Mogollon Rim:
raven and rainbow.
While there are zillions of fine photos of rainbows, the images used here are in an elite group. (Wish they were mine.) The rainbow does not just coexist with whatever else is in the scene; it works with the other elements and lifts a good image to greatness.
Subsection headings below are also links to pages with more detail.
Click on the link above if U have any interest at all in how dramatic skies can contribute to landscape photos. No interest? Click anyway and U will soon have one. The photo I used comes near the end in a long series of splendid examples.
I first saw this photo as a standout among standouts in a collection curated by Mitch Teemley, whose blog has many great collections alongside funny and/or insightful original content. The idea of a haiku with what became the last line of Arizona Sky came to mind quickly, but writing other lines I liked took longer. Much longer.
I wrote No Pots of Gold and later found this splendid photo to illustrate it (and inspire some haibun prose). The photo proved to be a gift that keeps on giving; it inspired Out of Reach.
Rainbows are one kind of spectrum. There are many other series rather like the somewhat quantitative R-O-Y-G-B-I-V of rainbows, and sometimes it helps to think of those spectra as rainbows. Two examples follow.
This post’s series of haiku exemplifies the spectrum of naturalism in haiku. Like Arizona Sky, many haiku are specific descriptions of a momentary observation. Like No Pots of Gold, some are toward the other extreme: general expressions of attitudes toward life, with at most a metaphorical reference to nature. Out of Reach is in between.
There is also a spectrum of compliance with the 5-7-5 rule, which is revered by some and reviled by others. Like most of my own haiku, the ones in this post comply. Tho I do respect the 5-7-5 rule, I also wrote a haiku that goes 3-2-5 and a haiku with just 2 lines. No apologies.
Hope ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #259
Morning Sun on Winter Wreath
Bird, bow, and berries
scatter rays of hope to me.
Today may be good.
Solitude ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #257
Not Alone
Lonely in the crowd
and weary of empty talk,
I seek solitude.
I was intrigued by the landscape’s azure sky in
While the sky is fine just as it is, it is also a good place for an overlay with text or another image.
I had already used a downloaded image of a wearisome crowd to illustrate the first 2 lines of my haiku Not Alone:
© Igor Zakowski | 123RF Stock Photo
(Image has been cropped.)
I decided to illustrate the whole haiku by overlaying the landscape’s sky with the crowd image, opaque at the top and then gradually fading out of sight toward the bottom. By the time I noticed that my photo editor does not support opacity gradients in overlays, I had my heart set on the project. Hmmm. Overall opacity of 60% in the overlay looks good, apart from the sharp horizontal line at the bottom of the overlay. Hmmm. My editor does have enough functionality to make that boundary a little blurry and wobbly, with one eye of Ms Purple Hair left staring at the viewer.
Mellow Curmudgeon 