Haiga

Failed Haiku

Tanka for autumn

apple picking

each year with children

now just we two

I gather the fruit

as I gathered memories

the brilliance of fall

coupled with shorter days

gives me pause

this certainty I accept,

yet I long to dally

a new month

the advance of autumn

proceedes quickly

morning frost on bare trees

and sweaters out of mothballs

Lyrical Passion Poetry, 11/2017

Tanka Anthology, 2015

Presence, winter 2015

Haiga

Haigaonline

Haibun

Heritage  Familiar songs from a land not mine, yet linked by genes. Stories told. A time imagined.  But for chance, I would have been a peasant like she was, living in scraggy hills, milking a goat, running over rocks in bare feet, so calloused they never bleed. There would be hungry days and starry nights with the wind for a companion. There would be fear and want and fleeting dreams waiting for my father to return.  After the letter arrives there would be a bumpy ride in a patched-up cart to the train.  With many a look back I would watch the dry, dusty land change into a crowded town with the smell of the sea where a ship waits in the harbor, belching smoke from its black stacks.  I would travel in the stink of the ship’s lowest depths with days of anxiety, heat and cold, hunger and sleepless nights, to reach another shore where life would begin again.  a soft spring day the family comes together for a funeral  Contemporary Haibun Online