Haibun

                                                    RENEWAL

 

Our new home will eventually be in the country.  We go there often to paint and work in the yard.

It's early May.  The rolling hills are lush with new grass.  The road bends and turns. A red barn and silo.  Holsteins and horses standing quietly in pastures.  Dogwood along the road, the delicate limbs spreading outward.  

So much to see.  I want to go slowly to absorb it all, to have this beauty become a permanent part of my being.

All too soon we reach our house where work awaits.  Once…someone's pride.  Now…overgrown grass to cut, bushes to prune, dead wood to remove.  So many trees and shrubs left to wither and die.  Years of neglect to undo. 

 

                                                the old house–
                                                finding in the side yard
                                                white lilacs

Contemporary Haibun On-line September 2006

Haibun

                                                    CLASS REUNION

After 40 years I wonder who will come.  The small Catholic women’s college isn’t open anymore.  There’s just the building, now a film institute.  I’ve come three thousand miles to see a bunch of old women. Knowing they’re old, but still surprised at how old they all look.  We look.  I sometimes forget to include myself.

                                                   trying on a smile–

                                                   the face in the mirror
                                                   not what I want to see

 We swap stories about marriages, divorces, death; show pictures of children, grandchildren and pets.  Some bragging, some honesty, some return to that free exchange of  confidences with a chosen few.  My best friend:   a little heavier, but the same deep voice and hearty laugh, the same vivacious personality and the same vice.

 
                                                   sharing smokes outside—
                                                   all the afternoon heat
                                                   in the low brick wall

Frogpond, Winter 2005

Haiga

                                                       For Martin Lucas

                                              poet and editor of Presence

                                                        Rest in Peace

Haiga

Haigaonline, spring 2013
part of a series, Spring in the Valley

April Haiku

                                                      
                                                          through the fog
                                                          splashes in the creek
                                                          and muffled quacking

                                                         persistant wind
                                                         forsythia blooming
                                                         in a crystal vase

                                                        warmer days
                                                        reflections on the pond
                                                        between ice floes

Dragonfly, Jan, 1976
Magnapoets
Haiku Presence Spring 2004
Simply Haiku, March 2011

Haiga

Haigaonline,spring 2013
part of a series, Spring in the Valley

Haiga

Haigaonline, spring 2013
part of a series, Spring in the Valley

Haibun

                                                          My Winter Muse 

You flit in and out, teasing me with promises, freezing up or vaporizing like mist all too quickly.  I search for you in the woodlands.  The trees naked and dark under a slate colored sky.  Branches and limbs tossed and tangled on the woodland floor. Last year’s leaves sticking to patches of old snow.

Horses in a muddy field wearing blankets, one a bright blue and gold plaid, glowing in the cold winter sunlight.  Beyond that field, another.  Dairy cows, their black and white hides splattered with mud.  Uncaring, except for munching bales of hay spread on a raised platform.

Rain and more cold.  The singing stream chokes up at an ice dam where a tree has fallen. 

                                                        sleepless hours

                                                     listening for words
                                                         in the wind
Contemporary Haibun On-line
August 2013