After the Haiku Conference, the Serenity of the Olympic Peninsula

mountain meadow
snow melt trickles past flowers-
frolic of fawns


I wrote this haiku on Olympic National Park's magnificent Hurricane Ridge where fawns were playing among the gorgeous flowers. Blooming were paintbrush, lupine, phlox, and several other varieties. You can drive almost all the way to this meadow, not that I am a fan of that. I prefer meadows you can hike too, and you can hike to this one also, but this year, the snowpack has extended into August and there are huge swathes of snow on the north slopes and in ravines. I attempted a five mile hike to a peak, but after a mile and half was stopped by a huge field of snow. Signs everywhere warned Leave No Trace, a philosophy I support. Since I had no poles, there was no way I could climb up the snow slopes though I could have slid down this one. However, I did not want to claw my way up off-trail.

The ranger said that the flowers were three weeks later than usual, but they were resplendent, so good timing for me. Also, I lucked upon an interesting animal altercation between a raven and a doe. They both wanted something on the snow--from where I stood, I could not see what it was--but guess who won the battle? Yep, the raven.

One event at the haiku conference (I will be sharing others in the next few weeks) was a memorial for haiku poets who died these last two years. (It's a biennial conference.) Marjorie Buettner from Wisconsin put together an excellent tribute to them featuring photos, images of their haiku and biographies of their lives. It was very moving. She also sang and played music. Because I am including a photo of lupine, here's a haiku by the late Mike Farley from Montana:

lupine
a darker blue
in the hoofprints




In a 2008 interview on the Tobacco Road Poet Blog, here's what Farley said about why he wrote haiku:

I write haiku for the sheer pleasure of it. I absolutely love reading good haiku and I've saved quite a long list of my favorites from other poets. Writing my own haiku, however, really good ones, is not easy for me. Juxtaposition and the images that can (and should) spring unspoken from between the lines is the key to the whole thing (for me anyway). It's so hard to do and so delightful when it happens.