Impressions of an afternoon

A wide belt of green
Curves towards gentle hills
The tramp of feet

Perfume and perspiration
A wide belt
Separates soft curves

Confident step following step
Following the pace of music
strapped to her forearm

Past the older couple
Slowly keeping pace with one another
Across the street
Across the years

A young man stands
Phone raised to ear, forgotten
Looking long after long-lost love

As the birds chase across the sky
in the song of early Spring

Discovery

Given the weekend that's in it, as they might say where I hail from, this poem from some time ago might be appropriate.

As I mentioned, I've always been worried that it's really to the rhythm of "The Night Before Christmas."

Discovery

It seemed like a time when endings were reached

When tears were shed, when defenses were breached

And bottles of bubbly were scattered about

And bodies and voices were joined in a shout

Of love and affection and joyful surrender

To feelings now passionate, now caring, now tender.

No more games were played, no more secrets hid

While both lay exposed to say what was said.

To discover the gods thought this all a game

And that which they felt could have only one name

But they had believed for some time it absurd

That any to them should apply such a word

But there could be no doubt, to those below nor above

This passion, this longing, it was Love, it was Love.

Requiem Aeternam

Walking through the world
My step stumbles
His voice, her voice, their voices
Heard in my heart, in my head
Out here in the wide world
Where they are no more.

Yet...

His face, her face, their faces
Swim before my eyes
As they once were
As they will always be
For—remembered—they remain
With us always.

Lux perpetua luceat eis
Dona eis requiem

An evening in October

The evenings are quiet here
A sense of the time that lies upon us
For a corner has been turned
And we are home

Looking out through the windows
The city lies before us
Not that city of garish lights
Of the bustle of the social set

Rather the trees of the park
Dressed in their Fall colors
And the college providing green space
And light for the mind

Yet the urgent ambulance
En route to Hospital Hill
Brings the truth of life to the fore
And grounds us in the world

Through all, the cats sleep and snore
And life breathes in, breathes out

Seventeen Syllables to Novellas

I have the honor of doing a guest blog over at Friday Flash dot org today. The road from seventeen syllables to novellas—or how living in a city can change your haiku.

Or, for that matter, how writing short poems can influence your prose.

Ramblings, in other words. Ramble on over, if you please.

Discovery

There are some who think themselves immune to love and it may take a parting to discover exactly how wrong they are. It can be unexpected and the subject of much laughter, and some tears. This piece hails from a long time ago, yet remains true.

Discovery

It seemed like a time when endings were reached

When tears were shed, when defenses were breached

And bottles of bubbly were scattered about

And bodies and voices were joined in a shout

Of love and affection and joyful surrender

To feelings now passionate, now caring, now tender.

No more games were played, no more secrets hid

While both lay exposed to say what was said.

To discover the gods thought this all a game

And that which they felt could have only one name

But they had believed for some time it absurd

That any to them should apply such a word

But there could be no doubt, to those below nor above

This passion, this longing, it was Love, it was Love.

A Rich and Rare Land

A Rich and Rare Friend.

The land? Ireland. The richness referring to the wealth of wit and words, in this case represented by poetry.

These words are complemented by paintings hailing from that same land. In some cases, one in particular, from the same family. William B Yeats is joined in the book by his brother the artist, Jack B Yeats.

The friend? That would be Va. Richness in this case referring to her wealth of story, art, fun, skill in the kitchen(!) and so much more.

The same Va gave me the book that shares the title of this entry — A Rich and Rare Land.

When I got home I opened the book and was lost to friend and foe for the next...period of time — I couldn't tell you how long.

The words. The words. Ranging from Seamus Heaney to translations of Turlough O'Carolan, from Jonathan Swift to John Millington Synge, from WB Yeats to Katherine Tynan. And then there's Patrick Kavanagh — of Raglan Road fame.

The art is no less evocative but my ear is attuned to the lilt of the language. It brings its own warmth.

Poetry does that to me. The sounds of that rich and rare land of Érin do that to me.

As does friendship.

Poetry for October 31st

Two pieces of poetry for the day, or night, that's in it — as they are known to say in Ireland. One, the first, I believe I've posted here before. The second, I may have. I can no longer remember.

I do know the second dates from 1993 when I was in Cupertino and newly come to the US.

in the twilight of the year
            when all is night;
venture forth all those
          who flee the light

to dance, to prance and merry-make
o'er all the world 'fore dawn should break
to win, to woo, to fright, to thrall
and mysteries hid reveal to all

to scale the furthest, safest tower
and steal within most virtuous bower
the wary, cautious, shy to tempt
and rusting, dusting sleep prevent

and tear away from righteous "Nay"
and whisper soft, "come on, let's play!"

ooo000ooo

The land was still and quiet

And a full moon

Looked down from an untroubled sky

Upon Silence.

Walking

A strange Presence -

Or perhaps Absence

Was sensed, was felt,

Was seen

Yet unseen when sought.

An ancient, ancient memory

stirred -

From the very bones of my Race

For this was the Eve of

Samhain

The Eve of All Hallows

And Strangeness walked the Land.

Friends, Cello Music, and Poetry

We had dinner this evening with a great friend of ours, Va. Good food, good company. What's not to like - as the saying goes. At the end of the meal, we stepped outside for some moon-watching, on this eve when the moon appears larger than usual.

Va reads my blog and noted my fondness for the cello. This evening she brought with her a CD of improvisations on the cello as inspired by the Tao Te Ching. We listened to it when we arrived back home - you would swear, were you one to swear, there was a cello, cellist included, in the living room. The CD is wonderful.

The 14th track had/has a repeated phrase that caught my ear - and, clearly, started wheels turning.

When they'd finished, the following presented itself:


A voice cries...

What is this place?
Where is this place?
I strike the doors
     the walls
Nothing yields,
I've never seen this place.
Why am I here?

Someone tell me!
Won't someone tell me?

Another voice cries...

I've always been here.
Never able to leave.
I strike the doors
      the walls
Nothing yields.
I've never been elsewhere.
Why cannot I leave?

Someone tell me!
Won't someone tell me?

Both voices - mine.

On Love and Barley...

On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho

A few days ago, I picked up the book shown to the right of this text. Given my fondness for haiku, how could I not? Basho was the pen name, if you will, of Matsuo Kinsaku who is known as the first great haiku poet. He lived in Japan in the latter half of the 1600s and is credited with, almost alone, reinvigorating the haiku form.

To quote the man on the subject of the lightness that belongs in haiku, "In my view a good poem is one in which the form of the verse, and the joining of its two parts, seem light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed."

And his work is light, often quiet, sometimes fanciful. Always beautiful. I don't read Japanese - although haiku is one poetry form that could drive me to learn.

The works are translated by Lucien Stryk and, in English, the translator has chosen not to concern himself with syllable count. This seems right to me. The intent is to convey the sense and beauty of the original poem - unlikely to be possible while tying oneself to English's syllable structure. No more than one could translate a sonnet, trying to maintain its specific rhyming structure, from English to Japanese and still have a poem.

Many of the works struck me, but the following just tickled my funny bone:

No hat, and cold
rain falling –
well!

I come from Ireland. It rains there, a lot. I can hear the exasperation in the final word.

The title of the book comes from the following:

Girl cat, so
thin on love
and barley.

The notes inform the reader that "Left-over barley and rice are still the staple diet of Japanese dogs and cats."

I feel for the poor girl cat.

A gift - and memories

I am fortunate in my siblings - and hope they might think so also, but I'm not going to ask.

My older sister has, over the years, given me books. One, The Maeve Binchey Writers' Club, was a very generous and thoughtful gift to this, her aspiring writer brother.

Early into the new year another arrived. And this took me back (not 'taken aback' you know, though I suppose I might have been in a way).

Back to High School, the final two years of secondary school, as I knew it growing up. It seems there's a demand that the poetry book used for those two years be republished. In the original cover, and using the original typeface.

The typeface, I must admit now, is less pleasing on the eye than I remember it. Though, at the time, I doubt I'd have known a pleasing typeface if it up and hit me in the eye. But, we learn as we grow - or so it is to be hoped.

What I remember about this book is I read it from cover to cover while at school. Anything else I did at school was the bare minimum - this book was worn out by the time I finished with it.


The editor, Augustine Martin, was a magician, able to capture the imagination of school kids - a difficult audience. Decades later, the book survives.

Part of the reason might be the selection of poets - Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickinson, Yeats and many, many more. Twenty-three, or so, in total.

Another part, the 'Explorations' after each poem - though as a student I grew to dislike them for they represented work, effort, they formed the basis of homework.  

Yet, for all that, they did give me a framework, an approach to poetry that has remained with me. However, the greatest 'exploration', advice to the reader of poetry, of the entire book arrives a little more than half-way through the book.

It is found after the first poem by Emily Dickinson included in the volume.

Here it is: 

"Having read the poem, now read all Emily Dickinson's poems in this book.  Don't feel that you have to make 'sense' of them, don't bully them in the hope they will yield up their message in a manner that can be summarised and paraphrased.  If you find that you like them, only one thing is required.  It can be best expressed by the advice the great Olympic athlete, Jesse Owens, gave to those who wish to be great long-jumpers.  His three rules were that you sprint, sprint, and finally sprint.  For the word 'sprint' we might here substitute 'read' with equal emphasis and repetition."

I can think of no better advice to anyone reading poetry. I also like, though again I didn't know of it at the time, the "Oxford comma" in the 'sprint, sprint, and finally sprint'.

Anyway, thanks to the generosity of my sister, I'm rediscovering poetry I haven't read in many a long year and, while I cannot claim that 'schooldays were the best days of my life' - how sad that would be - there are fond memories that I'm not unhappy to revisit.

On an entirely different note, above and a little to the right there is now a page dedicated to where my writings might easily be found.

Enjoy.

Reading - a life-long passion

As mentioned in my previous post, I didn't "win" NaNoWriMo 2011. Though I wasn't far off.

I blame November, Thanksgiving, and the seduction of The River Reader bookstore in Guerneville, a hundred or so miles north of San Francisco. Don't blame me if it's less, or more, than one hundred - travel and directions are not my thing, y'know?

We spent fours days in the environs of Guerneville, as we have for many years. There are several compulsory stops to be made, made compulsory by well engrained tradition by now.

One of them is the above-mentioned bookstore. A small independent store, they used to have a section of a wall dedicated to magnetic poetry, created by customers. Both of us left artily arranged words there over the years.

The store is eclectic in its stock, with local artists and writers well-represented.

So, why blame the proprietor for my NaNo fail? Ah well, the seduction of the books within. I always buy books there - it's one of the few places I buy "dead tree" books anymore. And I buy them by the armful.

The Natural Law of Water, poems by Kathleen Culver, caught my eye and her words caught my ear, and more than my ear.

I sat with the book, there in the bookstore and let the words sink in. I just like poetry. I like the art that transforms words, line, metre (forgive me, that's how I learned to spell it and how the word looks to me), shape, into feeling, into insight, into something that touches below the level of conscious thought.

And Ms. Culver can do this, and more.

A second book was A Radiant Life, by Nuala O'Faolain. Ms. O'Faolain was, among other things, a columnist and essayist for The Irish Times. This book holds between its covers columns of hers that span nearly twenty years.

Robust views, a clear-eyed perspective of Ireland and her society, and sometimes playful writing, the book is an education in the art of the column, the essay. And no small education on the realities of Irish society across the two decades they were written.

The title to the American edition, "A Radiant Life", is taken from the title of one of the essays. It tells of a young Irish-American woman, in whose honor there exists a statue in Japan. Maura O'Halloran became, at the age of 27, a Zen Master. And died but six months later in a motor accident.

Her book of journal entries and letters, "Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind", became another I had to go buy.

Perhaps it's not only the River Reader that has an eclectic collection of books.

Images - Masks, if you will

We each of us maintain a set of images which we preserve for "show". Those selves of ours which we display depending on a given set of circumstances.

There is a risk that such images, like wayward Adams and Eves, go their own ways - leaving us without the means of communicating with those around us.

It was with a sense of that happening, at a point in my life, that the following was penned. That goes some way to accounting for the tone of despair to be heard in the last lines.

o0o

Images

Darkness to Light, Day from Night
And I was.
No antelope raised its head
No pendulum checked its marking of time
Perhaps a mirror cracked
Which would explain
the many reflections that are mine.

Shadows, shades
In fact just aids
To Life, to living
Images really
Like that of Friday's child
Loving, giving.

But while the images dance
Changing to meet each challenge
It can get lonely here
Here at the center of a Universe
And it empty.

What to do with all these Haiku?

Those who have seen my tweets passing by in the timeline (what an odd construction that is...) or as part of the "news" page on facebook, or yet again, off to the right on this blog will have detected my fondness for the simple, though not easy, form of poetry known as Haiku.

How I love a sentence that runs pell-mell all over a page!

According to my Twitter page I've sent over 1,900 tweets. The vast majority of these will have been the short seventeen-syllable scraps of thought in poetic form. With enough practice you can get competent at anything. So, some of the haiku I've composed are good, arresting even. Some, by the same token, are pretty bad - but then, I'm recovering from a lifetime of perfectionist tendencies (not, I assure you, of perfection).

What to do with all these Haiku, I ask? Well, nothing actually. Nothing, at least with the vast majority of them. I quite like the fact that most of them are ephemeral. Less so than I thought as it turns out. I was quite surprised to discover how far back I could go along my Twitter timeline.

No matter, once composed and dropped into the timeline, I consider them off on their own. (Write if you get work, y'hear?)

However (there's always a "however", isn't there?), I've sometimes included a photograph I'd taken with a tweet, combining an image with the verse. These, of necessity, had to be hosted on some web site for viewing. And so they remained.

It was suggested that I might assemble them into an electronic book form. It's possible others might enjoy viewing and reading a collection of these #PhotoHaiku, as I called them within Twitter.

I imagined I might have sixteen or twenty to pull together. So it might make something interesting to view. I was wrong, I assembled over sixty of these photo and poetry combinations, grouping them into three sections:

• Light and Darkness
• Travel
• Seasons

I wondered how I was going to do it, and found that Scrivener, the tool I use on the Mac for my writing, has all the capabilities I needed to handle both the images and the text, in addition to generating native Kindle and Nook formats. The ePub format it generates also works for Apple's iBook - but Apple requires an ISBN - and I didn't have $125 handy.

And so, Haiku - Through a Lens was born. I'm currently thinking through how best to launch it, but the act of pulling together the images and text, grouping them in some coherent way and generating the final output was invigorating.

I must do this again.

On reading Irish short stories...

Hearing the sound
Of words
     As I read them

The morning
Fades away
     To deep silence

Home - is not a place
It is an echo
     You hear in your heart

Language as art - Audible...Visual...

I had a thought a few years ago, after attending a performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations, that it should be possible to do something similar with language. To take a theme, develop it, and then spin out a number (30? - oh dear) of variations on it. Not something infrequent in music, but in writing?


I wasn't aware of such being done before. And, for a while, I forgot my maxim: "There are only six good ideas in the Universe." It's true, there are - else what is Noah's Flood doing in the middle of Gilgamesh, I ask you?


Well anyway, after much deliberation - in truth, once I got over being scared of the idea - I began a series of flash pieces on this blog, tagged with GoldbergVariations so I can keep track of them.


Of course, no sooner had I begun these than I learned of Raymond Queneau who, after attending a performance of Bach's Art of the Fugue, set about writing a simple theme - and producing 99 variations on it.

The result is a book titled "Exercises in Style". The book was written in French and translated into English in the 50s by Barbara Wright - who knew the author. It is witty, erudite, crazy-making. There's even a variation that is a Haiku. How could I not love it?


So, yet another "not-unique" idea, KjM. Maybe so, but I am in great company.


In great company, even more than I thought. Right around the other side of the globe, Rayna M. Iyer who blogs at Coffee Rings Everywhere began a series of Drabbles (exactly 100-word stories) using a painting by Van Gough - Cafe Terrace at Night 1888. Each one is a gem. To read the eight of them - go here.

There is a pleasure I take in not being unique - this time. I like the idea of inspiration, modes of expression, approaches, from one art form being applied to another. Will it all work? Who knows?


What's the Bard have to say on this - "Things won are done. Joy's soul lies in the doing."

Poetry as a reading aid - and just because

Olivia Tejada quoted me on her blog, talking about how poetry can be used to strengthen a writer's prose.

Doing so she reminded me where my own love of poetry comes from. My father.

When I was younger I had a bad habit (as I grew older I developed other bad habits, but that's another post for another day) of speed-reading. For no good reason I can think of. I read somewhere that John F. Kennedy used to speed-read, reading down the middle of a page. It was just enough to capture the sense of a book, a topic.

I have no idea if that is actually true. The world is full of apocryphal stories. What remains true is I was reading too rapidly to pick up the spelling of words. In truth, I may well have been reading too rapidly to pick up the meaning of the words.

My father's suggestion - poetry. He explained that I would have to slow down, because every word matters in poetry. The fact of it being there, the shape, the sound, the very word order, all matter. Not, in reality, a bad way to create prose either.

My father didn't mention anything about the beauty such care creates. I think he believed I was bright enough to discover that myself. How could I not? Poetry is not this pale, ethereal thing. Even at its most spare and delicate it is a muscular, passionately living force that can grab the reader and not let go. It did with me, and hasn't.

I don't expect it ever will.

The Eve of All Hallows

in the twilight of the year
            when all is night;
venture forth all those
          who flee the light


to dance, to prance and merry-make
o'er all the world 'fore dawn should break
to win, to woo, to fright, to thrall
and mysteries hid reveal to all


to scale the furthest, safest tower
and steal within most virtuous bower
the wary, cautious, shy to tempt
and rusting, dusting sleep prevent


and tear away from righteous "Nay"
and whisper soft, "come on, let's play!"