birthday haiku

on my birthday
rain and more rain--
your voice over the wires

Dandelion in Winter

Christmas dandelion
poking through leaves--
no snowman this year!



This Taos photo shows my favorite kind of Christmas lights, luminarios in New Mexico, candles set in decorative paper bags. New Mexicans place these on driveways, on rooftops, and on the adobe walls surrounding their houses. It's incredibly peaceful to see their gentle glow against the dark desert December night.

Cloud Shrouded

blue clouds hide sun--
writing Christmas cards
your crossed-out name

Here is a quote I came across in an interview with Rita Gray, a NY City haikuist and play therapist. Ce Rosenow interviewed her in the October 2011 edition of "Ripples: Haiku Society of America Newsletter." Here's what Rita said about the appeal of haiku, "I am drawn to haiku because it is the poetry of the senses, rooted in nature and the seasons. In these aspects it is very concrete, and common to all people. I also like that the form is so compact, which gives nuance to every word. Haiku are also spacious. They provide the writer, and the reader, with room for big human experiences..."

Today started out grey and dark, but by mid-afternoon when I was half buried in old envelopes and three different address books--one tiny, one old, one never updated--the sun had come out but was playing hide and seek with a covey of startling dark blue clouds. There was that one moment when turning a page, I spotted in my neat handwriting (for once) my college roommate's address. Two weeks ago I heard that she had died. I sent a card to her husband; it was the hardest one I wrote, knowing the great sadness he must be feeling.

To Haymarket, to Haymarket on a New Winter's Day

at solstice
hay truck rumbles past
scent of summer


I love grand seasonal events such as the solstice. And yes, especially, the winter solstice, though our winters are growing noticeably shorter. And I really fear what that means.

But though I love winter, I hate the early darkness. So when solstice arrives, it reminds me that the days will very soon be growing longer even if for a week or so they hover around the same length.

Astronomical events --solstices, equinoxes--connect us to people through all the millenias, people much like ourselves hurrying to complete their daytime activities before darkness strikes.

And though I saw this hay truck yesterday rather than today, I liked how it fit into the solstice theme even though hay in December seems thoroughly out of season. As I drove down Morningside to turn onto Third a big old truck rattled past filled with hay. And though the day was grey and rainy, those yellow piles of hay radiated a blond cheerful light, and reminded me of summer and summer's earthy smells.

Squirrel Tauntings

squirrel perched
high on a waving tree limb
mocking terrestrial me


True story: I came outside one day this past week. It was grey and blustery with high winds. Hearing a strange jeering, I looked up and noticed a squirrel high on an attenuated limb near the top of our sixty-year old maple. He was riding the limb back and forth and seemed to be taunting me stuck so low to the ground.

It reminded me of the John Muir story about what he did in Yosemite during summer storms. He loved to climb the highest tree around (on a mountainside no less!) and ride that pine as if it were a wild bronco. I love what that story says about his love for nature and his love for risk.

Too often these days of Weather Channel and constant media warnings about bad weather we're encouraged to stay hunkered inside, to treat the weather as other, as frightening, as deadly. Not that it can't be any of those things, but it can also be energizing, recharging, and a wonderful world to explore apart from the ordinary.

I love days like that when the wind pummels in from the west and nearly lifts you up, hurrying you on your way. And I love days like today: calm, brisk, sunny, and filled with the light of the winter world. Time to take a hike in a nearby forest. Let the others shop. I will stride through the quiet under bare-limbed yellowwood and oak.

Seeing Anew

Dedicated to Lu/ALA Luci for her Continuous Birthday!


circling the loop
each time we face east again
your joy in Venus



One of the few things I know experientially about haiku is that it is about seeing, or rather seeing anew. Everyday we scan faces, objects, elements of the natural world, but how many of them do we really take in to the point of consciously reflecting upon them?

I've been very lucky in having had two year-long experiences in vastly different cultures and regions. The first occurred in my twenties when we spent a school year in the Inupiat village of Kivalina, Alaska. Kivalina lies on the edge of a narrow sandspit between the Chukchi Sea and a lagoon. Tundra and rolling hills lie across the lagoon, and in the far distance the DeLong Mountains rose. In Nov. the lagoon and sea ice froze. Eventually great ice hummocks formed and I could walk upon the sea, but it looked nothing like an ocean, but instead an immense snowy landscape indistinguishable from land. At times, I felt as though I was wandering through a kind of giant sculpture garden of gorgons and ice statues and frozen knobs. The culture was 20th century American mixed with hunter/gathering. Everyday I learned new things, saw new things, experienced new foods, crafts, and language.

Just after I turned forty, I experienced my second "wonder year." We moved to Yogyakarta, Indonesia where my husband worked on a rice project. In some ways this was even more intense than the Alaskan year: we lived in a city of two million on the most crowded island on earth, Java. Navigating--especially crossing the avenues-- took courage plus a jumbo helping of sheer foolhardiness because the intense roar of traffic never stopped and you had to dodge honking cars and trucks, rattling motorcycles and bikes with entire families on board, water buffalo, bejaks, etc. etc. When we first moved to Yogka, I'd wake up at dawn to the call of the muezzin, and take a morning walk. After about ten minutes, I'd get the most intense headache from all the unfamiliar sights, smells, sounds, along with the crowds jostling in the tropical air.

When you first move to a new country or very different region, you become overwhelmed by all this new seeing. Your filters don't block as much of this sensual world as they do when it becomes familiar to you.

This "seeing anew," the kind that comes with being a person in a strange new place can really help you write haiku. Through it you can discover the extraordinary in the daily, those "aha" moments that you must not let pass by. When my Dad had dementia, we'd take walks at dusk around a loop in his neighborhood. Since it was short, a quarter mile or so, we'd circle the route over and over for exercise. Each time we turned toward the lavender twilight glow with Venus burning brightly above it, Dad would view it as though it were brand new. "Would ya take a look at that big, bright star?" he'd say. "Ain't it gorgeous?" And then again, "Would ya take a look at that big, bright star?"

Animal Callings

in grey December
the barred owl’s call
colors the sky


Thom Gillespie: photo

As we hurtle toward the winter solstice, these last two days I've experienced two wonderful "animal hearings." Last night at this very spot, I heard through the closed window the unmistakable rhythm of a barred owl's call, repeated every few minutes. I went out on the back deck to investigate. As clouds scuttled across the moon, I heard very clearly and from very nearby, perhaps in my neighbor's pear tree, an owl calling plaintively for a mate.

Tonight, just an hour ago, as Tom and I walked Mr. Darcy through the neighbor, I kept hearing a high-pitched noise as if children were calling or yelling to each other. It got louder and louder, so I stopped and looked up. After a few minutes in the light of the full moon, I saw a large skein of all white geese heading south--I assume they were snow geese. Quite dramatic as they flew past using the moon to navigate.

Moon Secrets

third night of rain
clouds hide waxing moon--
keeping his secret

Have you seen the almost full moon tonight? It looks immense in the winter sky. The moon was and is a very common topic for Japanese haiku. Many Japanese poets write about moon viewing, an activity that the Japanese with their great love of nature, probably embrace more fully than any other culture in the world.

One of my favorite Arctic memories was hiking along Kivalina's sand spit directly toward the full moon. At that latitude the moon seemed much bigger than here and it reflecting so brightly onto the snow that it didn't seem as if it were really night at all, but some other state between day and night. I had to force myself to turn around and go back, but that dang moon was incredibly magnetic.

The Farmers' Almanac nicknames December's moon as "Full Long Nights Moon" or "Full Cold Moon." Take advantage of these long nights to do some moon viewing of your own.

Turkey and Letters

Thanksgiving Day
reading our mother's letters--
steam swirls from the cup



Outside of Providence, Rhode Island three of my sisters and I and our families met for the holiday. My oldest sister Rosemary, who lives in Canada, brought down a trove of old letters from the 80s. For a while as the turkey baked, we four sisters sat around the dining room table taking turns reading them. Often we'd read sentences about ourselves--what we were doing, whether we would be coming home for Christmas.

They were both funny and sad. Funny, because my mother always wrote in non sequiturs. And you never knew what piece of news she'd place next to something totally unrelated such as "We had spaghetti for dinner. Susie is having a baby in September. Last Saturday, Dad and I looked for a new living room couch." Sad because this whole time my mother had cancer, and many of the letters documented her visits to the doctors, etc.

Reading them over twenty years later, we could see she was the glue in the family, the communicator in this pre-email, pre-social media days.

The last letter was particularly poignant. She told Rosemary that she was feeling weak, so Kathy was recording her words.

And how beautiful each of those sounded in my sister's voice.

Haiku Reading

One benefit of the Internet revolution is that I have been discovery many articles about haiku online during this year of haiku education. Today, I’ve been reading one with the lovely title “Haiku as Poetic Spell” written by New Zealander, Martin Lucas.

Lucas takes a rather critical look at contemporary haiku calling it too conformist and too strict with pattern. He's not really complaining about the overused 5-7-5 syllabic formula but railing against the constant use of seasonal words and the fact that many modern haiku use juxtaposition to contrast different images in a much too predictable way. Lucas finds that these techniques used too often create a body of haiku that although individually well-written, can become bland and yes, boring.

One way to correct this, he suggests, is with the placement of “pauses and stresses,” making them vary “considerably from poem to poem." The ingredients for a great haiku, Lucas believes are, “Words that chime; words that beat; words that flow. And once you've truly heard it (this kind of haiku), you won't forget it, because the words have power. They are not dead and scribbled on a page, they are spoken like a charm; and they aren't read, they're heard.”

I love his summary of what he desires from haiku: "something primitive; something rare; something essential…They begin and end each reader's unique reflection.”

Now that’s haiku to strive for.