Buy again next fall?
No, it’s good year after year,
until mice find it.
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Indian Corn
Category: photography
Seasons & Theodicy
I bring some seasonality indoors with rotating decorations, mostly artificial versions of whatever is blooming outdoors. Pondering three displays (for spring, summer, and fall) sends me in an unexpected direction.
Elegy for a Green Insect
First few cold days ask
“Who can overwinter?”
Katydids cannot.
When I wrote the original version of my haiku, I was aware that some insects can overwinter as adults, even where winters are harsher than in the Mexican mountains favored by monarch butterflies. Bark beetles are a dreaded example. Seeing a lethargic insect shaped like familiar crickets (but bigger and more colorful), I wrote a haiku voicing the unlikely hope that the insect (later nicknamed “Kermit” after the famous green frog) might be able to overwinter:
Last few mild days ask
“Ready to overwinter?”
Cricket moves slowly.
A helpful comment by Sue Ranscht on my post with that haiku prompted me to dig a little deeper. Kermit was a young male katydid. Winters where I live are mild enough for his mother’s eggs but still too harsh for him. Kermit ran out of time before maturing. That makes the middle line of my original haiku more like a taunt than a sincere question, so I revised the haiku to be an elegy for Kermit the katydid.
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Green on Green
Last few mild days ask
“Ready to overwinter?”
Cricket moves slowly.
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Dark Flame & Wicked Grin
Happy Halloween!
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Stubborn?
Ignoring hints
from tulip tree and maple,
elm stays green, for now.
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Maples — Where and When
Two kinds of maple are common where I live. Sometimes called “swamp maple” because it can thrive in swampy areas, red maple can also thrive atop rocky hills and in the intermediate conditions of landscaped yards. Sugar maples are the other (and more finicky) kind.
The wide range of suitable habitats may partly explain the wide range of turning times for red maples. While they turn early in swampy areas, some of them in other areas turn as late as oaks. Those that turn at a middling time don’t seem to mind being upstaged by the best of the sugar maples:
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Black Hole in Galaxy of Leaves
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Ferns & Fall Foliage
Autumn is a season when images accumulate faster than I can write appropriate poetry, so I will sometimes post an unsung image.
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Up from Down
Sundown where I am
is sunup to someone else,
a world’s width away.
Photo © Patrick JenningsSundown ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #351
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Mother Nature’s Inner Child
Her crayon goes from Sun to Earth,
thru a window and some glassware,
and then a little farther still.
She scribbles nonsense on a wall.
Yes, using the category [ekphrastic poetry] would be more accurate than using the category [haiga]. The word [ekphrastic] is way too dysphonious for describing any kind of poetry I might like, so I pretend that the poem is a haiku. Close enough?
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Goldenrod
Ah, such a cheery yellow graces the month of September. Alas, ragweed flowers out of sight at the same time, giving goldenrod a bad rep among some people with hay fever. While ragweed sheds pollen to the whims of the wind, goldenrod holds pollen that will be picked up and transported by insect pollinators. You’re not likely to inhale any goldenrod pollen unless a bee crawls up your nose.
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Serenity in Motion
Riding the wind and
calm about impermanence,
clouds form and vanish.
Calm ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #348
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Fortunate Photons
From a distant sun,
some light finds another sun
and can shine again.
Glowing yellow like the sun,
spider waits for prey to come.
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Teenager
Too old for childhood;
too young for raising children.
Blurry persona.
Like many juvenile birds, this male cardinal sat still and looked befuddled, then changed position a little, and then sat still and looked befuddled. With his face centered in the focus frame and a moderately fast shutter speed, he should have been in focus. My camera’s autofocus probably got distracted by the twigs all around him. While my camera has good manual overrides for most of its automatic choices, its manual focusing is a lame joke. So I made lemonade from lemons with the final line of my haiku.
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Abandoned Temple
The haiku here is a 5-7-5 version of the last 3 lines from a poem by Patrick Jennings.
Memories linger
tho nobody is still here
to remember them.
Visit Lingering to see the inspiration.
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Mellow Curmudgeon 