HAPPY HOUR     

 

Apples sauteed in butter with brown sugar and cinnamon. Sunday morning breakfast to be eaten on the deck.  After a week of rain, followed by a five-day heat wave, a perfect Sunday arrives and shouts that something special is in order. Add orange juice, toast with strawberry jam and lots of hazelnut coffee

 

The sun’s rays are filtered through the Japanese maple. No need to open an umbrella. Birds in trees are vocal, but unseen. The stream, also unseen, gurgles softly. I leave my cell phone inside. Phone calls can wait. Emails and text messages can wait. This hour is mine.

 

so easy to ignore

the pleasures of each day

to push past small joys

            I slow down my breathing

            and open up to wonder

Drifting Sands, spring 2026                                        

Haiku

 

decaying barn

the emptiness

locked inside 

Cattails

 the moon pauses

between a gap in the trees—

half an answer

A Hundred Gourds

Haiku

 ice storm

sculping the pine

needle by needle

Bottle Rockets

Tanka

 daffodil tips

through patches of snow

are the first sign

they send me rushing

to wear something yellow

TSA Anthology

Haiku

 

winter sunshine

I borrow the easy chair

from the cat

Presence

Tanka Prose

 

What Remains

 

We are newly married, live in an apartment, have no garden, but for entertainment we browse nurseries. On an impulse, we buy a small lemon tree to give to my parents for their back yard. 

 

My father is not a gardener, and we have only a hope that the southern California sun and an occasional watering will be sufficient for the lemon tree’s survival. Dad, however,  adopts that seedling, tending to its needs as a father to a child. Watering, fertilizing, pruning. It thrives, and through the years produces more than enough lemons for my parents and for us and neighbors. In his late years, living alone, Dad is neglectful of the house, but not the lemon tree. After he dies and the house sold, the new owners cut down the lemon tree to create an unencumbered back yard for their children’s play area.

 

lemon blossoms

swirling in the breeze—

a look back

to a memory sweetened

with the passing of time

Contemporary Haibun Online