Artwork by Rick Daddario, 19 Planets
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night rain
the fainter sound
of the ocean
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water
Drifting Clouds (Yotsumono)
Tanka? Okay, I Can Do That
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I check
to see what’s sprouted
we’re separated now
by the life span
of squash and cucumbers.
on the way
to see the apple blossoms —
I admire how
your story changes
with every streetlight.
(Ribbons: Tanka Society of America Journal, 7:1, Spring 2011)
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Tanka. I keep mentioning tanka in what I know is this extremely skeptical tone of voice. I spent a long time trying not to think about them. I think I was having a hard enough time trying to understand haiku (not that that process is or ever will be over for me) and seeing these tanka things, which looked kind of like haiku but were the wrong length and sounded very different, confused me. And kind of annoyed me, too, because a lot of them (although not, by any means, as high a percentage as I used to think) are flowery and dreamy and romantic and … I’m not. Flowery, dreamy, romantic things usually just make me want to go balance my checkbook or something. Or throw up. (Yes, I am a fun date. Thanks for asking.)
So I was all grouchy about tanka and didn’t even want to learn anything about it, which is unusual for me because generally I want to learn everything about everything, and the sooner the better. I sneered at and winced about and cast aspersions on tanka … and then, at some point this winter, I started writing it. Still without having the slightest idea what it actually was. Don’t ask me what that was all about. I think I was just having one of those days where haiku seemed too short. You know those days. Where you’re like “Seventeen syllables? Max? Give me a break.”
I wrote a bunch of these things and eyed them warily, and then heaved a weary sigh and went crawling humbly around the web to find out what I had done. I was thrilled to find this essay about the origins of tanka by Jane Reichhold, because it’s very funny and made me feel like maybe I didn’t have to worry so much about tanka but could just enjoy it:
“From tanka’s long history – over 1300 years recorded in Japan — the most famous use of the poetry form of tanka was as secret messages between lovers. Arriving home in the morning, after having dallied with a lover all night, it became the custom of well-mannered persons to write an immediate thank-you note for the pleasures of the hospitality. Stylized into a convenient five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 onji, the little poem expressing one’s feelings were sent in special paper containers, written on a fan, or knotted on a branch or stem of a single blossom. These were delivered to the lover by personal messenger who then was given something to drink along with his chance to flirt with the household staff. During this interval a responding tanka was to be written in reply to the first note which the messenger would return to his master.
Usually under some pressure – the writer had probably been either awake or engaged in strenuous activities all night – to write a verse that related, in some manner, to the previous note, that expressed (carefully) one’s feelings, and which titillated enough to cause the sender to want to return again was not an easy task. Added to this dilemma was the need to get the personal messenger on his way with a note so written that he couldn’t know exactly what was what but that the beloved would understand and appreciate. Then the giggling servants would get back to work.
“…Looking at tanka history it seems that the only infallible way of writing great tanka is to have an affair. Go ahead! Do it now. But that doesn’t mean that it must be a behind-the-bushes affair in the no-tell motel. Let yourself fall in love with anything or anyone you want to. It can be nature, a scene, a place, an activity, persons; your own kids, grandkids or even – your mate, or just life itself. Whatever feels good and right for you.
Because of their original use as a way of privately expressing emotion and especially between friends and lovers unhappy because they are separated, the feelings expressed in traditional tanka were usually either longing for better time, more faithful lovers, younger years or grief because of old age, lack of lovers, or hard times. You get the picture. When reading a great many tanka you realize you are hearing a lot of bitching. For some writers this is just the outlet for which they have been looking.”
— Jane Reichhold, “Tanka for the Memory“
So that was my first tanka breakthrough. My second happened when I humbly sent a bunch of my lame tanka off to be edited by Aubrie Cox, who graciously refrained from telling me I had no idea what I was doing and with her magical touch lightly and deftly transformed the least lame of them into something that a tanka editor might not be too appalled to see appearing in his or her inbox. The two above are the first I had accepted for publication. It felt pretty weird, I have to tell you. “Wait — I’m not a tanka poet. Am I? Oh God. I guess I am. Can I go throw up now?”
I’ve gotten over it, though. For one thing, I’ve actually read a lot of tanka since then, and a lot of it I like a lot. Also, some of my best friends are wonderful tanka poets, so I’ve really had to force myself to examine my unwarranted prejudices. If you get this issue of Ribbons, for instance (which I highly recommend you do), you will find the following stupendous tanka by my buddy Margaret Dornaus of haiku-doodle gracing the back cover, and being wonderfully and lovingly dissected inside the journal by its editor, Dave Bacharach:
at Toad Suck
I contemplate syllables
and old ponds
like a child puddle-jumping
loudly through soft falling rain— Margaret Dornaus
And right next to it you will find another stupendous tanka by Jeffrey Woodward (Haibun Today editor extraordinaire), which Bacharach has deliberately placed in counterpoint with Margaret’s:
sweet,
but with a slight tang,
the rejected
and twisted little
apples of Winesburg— Jeffrey Woodward
Even I have to admit that there is nothing romantic, dreamy, etc. about either of these tanka, and that they are, in fact, quite brilliant and thought-provoking poems that just happen to be two lines longer than your typical haiku and to be attempting something rather different though not entirely unconnected. If you’re looking for a better explanation than I or probably anyone else but R.H. Blyth could provide of what exactly that something is, check out this essay by Don Wentworth over at Issa’s Untidy Hut, which gives us plenty of Blyth for our delectation.
For even more tanka information, Tanka Online and American Tanka are good places to look, and Charlotte Digregorio has recently written an essay on her blog that is a good, brief introduction to the subject. Besides Ribbons, the print journals Moonbathing, Eucalypt, and red lights publish tanka exclusively; bottle rockets publishes it among other Japanese verse forms, and so does the online journal Notes from the Gean. I’m probably forgetting someone. As I so often do. Feel free, as always, to tell me what I’m missing.
*
[Note: If you subscribe to this blog, you are not imagining things. Another version of this essay appeared a few days ago. It was an accident — it wasn’t finished yet — and I promptly deleted it. Sorry about the confusion.]
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things to wake up for
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full moon
her water breaks
silently
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April 2011 Moon Viewing Party, Haiku Bandit Society
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__________________________________________________________________________________
(I woke up for what I thought was no reason last night and then realized that I must have been wakened by the full moon, which seemed to be taking up most of my window. It reminded me of one night in September 1994 when I also woke for what seemed like no reason, except that when I stood up my water broke and fourteen hours later my son was born. So that was a good reason to wake up.)
April 30 (Tide Pool)
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tidepool
I stir in
more salt
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a handful of stones, 4/21/2011
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April 26 (Alternating Current)
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alternating current
the river
and the moon
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(Daily Haiku, 4/17/2011)
April 14 (Spilled Moon)
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the heat —
spilled moon poaching
in the river
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(NaHaiWriMo topic: Rivers and streams)
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..
Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 14th:
Boxes and other containers
_____________________________
See this post for an explanation of what this is.
See the NaHaiWriMo website.
See the NaHaiWriMo Facebook page, and contribute haiku there if you want. (It doesn’t have to have anything to do with this prompt. It’s just a suggestion.)
April 13 (Pink Balloon)
pink balloon
you teach me to breathe
helium
(NaHaiWriMo topic: Chemical elements)
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Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 14th:
Rivers and streams
_____________________________
See this post for an explanation of what this is.
See the NaHaiWriMo website.
See the NaHaiWriMo Facebook page, and contribute haiku there if you want. (It doesn’t have to have anything to do with this prompt. It’s just a suggestion.)
April 11 (Roaring Breakers)
roaring breakers
I implore the whale
for its name
(NaHaiWriMo topic: Really big things)
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Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 12th
Sleep
_____________________________
See this post for an explanation of what this is.
See the NaHaiWriMo website.
See the NaHaiWriMo Facebook page, and contribute haiku there if you want. (It doesn’t have to have anything to do with this prompt. It’s just a suggestion.)
See Dick run … no, wait.
If you don’t have a Facebook account or don’t want to post haiku there, feel free to post them in my comments.
Or just write them down somewhere and keep them a secret.
Or don’t write anything at all. Whatever works for you.
I’ll be back tomorrow, same time, same place, with another suggestion.
March 13: For Japan
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earthquake —
no plum blossom viewing
this year
(thanks to Gabi Greve for inspiring this haiku)
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*
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tsunami
clouds flooding
the moon
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radiation leak moonlight on the fuel rods
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moon viewing
before and after
satellite pictures
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earthquake news —
beginning to learn
Japanese
March 8: This Is Not a Haiku
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Forward
March: It’s not just about the wind.
Light from the sun reaches us
and keeps going.
Raindrops flow like glass on glass.
My son is tracing circuit diagrams
on the back of a page from Hamlet.
We all dream that way sometimes.
When you climb a mountain
it divides the day.
Spring at the bottom and
winter at the top.
I pick up the phone, put it down again.
It’s not the right season to go backward.
I wish some year I’d remember
to write down the date
I hear the first bird sing.
Once a red-tailed hawk
moved into our neighborhood
and surveyed the chipmunks for days
before deciding to move on.
Don’t tell me you’ve never been tempted
to stay too long.
I’m sure there’s a song about that.
The equinox is coming:
are you equal to it?
This is when we realize
that snow is water.
That ice is light.
That every day the sun reaches us
at a slightly different angle:
March.
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________________
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So I’m really busy this week. Really. Insanely. Busy. Right now I should be doing six other things. Going to bed being one of them. Every minute for the last week I should have been doing six other things. A lot of those minutes I spent writing poetry instead. I’m hopeless that way.
At one point I guess I decided that it wasn’t enough to jot down a haiku or two in my off minutes, I needed to write a longer poem instead, one that would require some concentrated effort and allow me to put off my much more boring tasks for as long as possible. So I wrote this. Sorry.
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March 5: The 5-7-5 Project
So as you all know (right? right?) the Haiku Foundation is running a haiku contest right now called HaikuNow. The deadline is March 31 and you are all going to enter (waves Jedi hand). I’m planning on entering myself, and here is where my story for today starts.
There are three categories in the contest: Traditional, Contemporary, and Innovative. I want to enter all three categories, because hey, why not. It’s probably best to go to the site for the explanation of what all these categories consist of, but suffice it to say, probably the majority of haiku you see here (mine and other people’s) fall into the Contemporary category, a few into the Innovative category, and practically none into the Traditional category, because the Traditional category requires that the haiku be three lines, 5-7-5 syllables. Yes! Isn’t that cool and retro!
On seeing this in the rules, I thought, “Wow. 5-7-5. Can I even do that? I mean, you know, without sounding like an idiot?” Whenever I’ve tried writing 5-7-5 in the past , they’ve ended up stilted and wordy, and that’s usually what I think about most 5-7-5 efforts by other people as well. I don’t think 5-7-5 works well most of the time for English haiku, for whatever reason. Unnecessary words and unnatural syntax seem to be almost inevitable.
But I’m always up for a challenge. So I devised this little project for myself about a week ago to try to ensure that by March 31 I would have a 5-7-5 haiku whose guts I didn’t hate. I decided to write one every day. Okay, that doesn’t sound like much of a project. But I also decided to then rewrite it in the way that I would write it if I were addressing the subject in my usual haiku style (whatever that is — if you’ve figured it out please let me know because I don’t have a clue).
I’m hoping that this exercise will help me figure out, not just how to write 5-7-5 better, but also a few other things I’ve been wondering about haiku, like whether maybe most people (including me) are in fact writing them too short these days, and what kind of information and words it is necessary or optimal to have in haiku, and … I don’t know. Some other stuff I don’t remember right now. It’s been a long day.
So just for fun … here’s one of my attempts at 5-7-5 and Not 5-7-5. You’re welcome to join me in this project if you want, for the month or just for a day or two or whatever. Let me know what your thoughts are.
_____________________
three humpbacks breaching
three blue hills in the distance
that seem to rise, rise —
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whale watch
on shore
blue hills breach
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NaHaiWriMo, Week 4: On Being Weird
22 editing an elephant gray seems too vague
23 encoding fairy tales </eastofthesunwestofthemoon>
24 ovulation trying to locate the scent of apple
25 menstruation sinking lower in the waves
26 political protest a deathwatch beetle in the drum circle
27 the mouse in the kitchen does he also hear the owl
28 particles streaming from the sun we wait on this rock to receive them
_________________________
Whew. I made it.
I don’t know why this felt so hard. I’ve been writing haiku every day for ten months now. And, you know, sharing them with the reading public. I think it was just that I was trying to do something really different from what I usually do — trying to be weird and experimental, just kind of throw stuff against the wall and see what stuck.
And even though I told myself that this would be freeing and relaxing, I was surprised to find that I actually found it very stressful to try to come up with something Original and Interesting every day that I wasn’t incredibly embarrassed to let you guys see. Well, a lot of it I actually was incredibly embarrassed to let you guys see. This week may have started out the weirdest of all and then by the fifth day I was getting freaked out enough that I actually followed a couple of Michael Dylan Welch’s (excellent) NaHaiWriMo daily writing prompts, which until then I’d pretty much ignored in the spirit of experimental individualism. I just couldn’t take the pressure of marching to such a different drummer any more.
I thought sometimes this month of the title of the physicist Richard Feynman’s autobiography: “Why Do You Care What Other People Think?” This is a question his wife challenged him with when he was very young. Mostly Feynman didn’t care a lot what other people thought, which is part of what made him so brilliant. (The other part was that he was, you know, brilliant.)
So why do I care? I mean … no one scolded me for being too experimental this month, at least not out loud; people said nice things about the haiku they liked and politely kept their mouths shut about the ones that they didn’t. No one is ever mean to me on this blog. My readership didn’t go down, people didn’t unsubscribe. I still felt stupid and incompetent a lot of the time. Apparently I am way more insecure than I thought I was.
This worries me a little, because it must mean that most of the time I am trying to write haiku that I think other people will approve of. Of course this isn’t entirely bad, the point of writing is supposed to be communication after all, so if no one understands or likes what you’re writing … well, you can either carry on in the same vein hoping that future generations will be more enlightened, or you can seriously consider the possibility that there’s something wrong with your writing. But if you’re spending so much time worrying about what other people think that you never actually figure out what you think yourself, that’s a problem too.
Also, I think I freaked out a little at how good everyone else’s NaHaiWriMo stuff seemed to me. A lot of people seemed to take this exercise really seriously and put their best foot forward and come up with superlative work that really blew me away … and then there’s me, sitting in the corner tossing my word spaghetti at the wall, with a slightly village-idiot expression on my face.
Anyway. (She said defensively.) Just so you know, I wrote a lot of other haiku this month that are a lot more, you know, normal. You’ll probably be seeing a fair number of them in the next couple of months. So don’t unsubscribe! The worst is over … and I will be discussing my inferiority complex with my imaginary therapist, so don’t worry about me.
NaHaiWriMo, Week 3
15 bicycle light never stopping to let me catch up
16 multiplication tables all the things I can’t forget
17 peace pipe blowing bubbles beside the sea
18 expired passport all the nebulae I kept meaning to visit
19 protest march spring comes anyway
20 microwave platter my food comes from a dying star
21 resisting arrest unidentified weeds in the garden
_______________________
Week One is here. Week Two is here.
Am I getting any better? … Never mind, I don’t want to know.
February 17: Numerical Order
“To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test” (New York Times)
..
seven or eight sparrows count them again
..
This haiku appeared on this blog last May, and on Haiku News last week (with the headline above).
For some reason, even though I wrote it in pretty much my first week of writing haiku, it is still one of my favorites of my own poems. Beginner’s luck, I guess.
Why do I like it so much? (You don’t have to ask so incredulously.) Well…first of all, there’s the whole “it’s true” thing. It’s impossible to count birds. (Impossible for me, anyway; maybe you’ve had better luck.) They keep moving. They’re transient, they’re transitory.
So many things in life are. You can’t pin them down. You look one minute and things look one way; the next minute they look entirely different. Don’t even ask about the differences between years.
But for some reason we (and by “we” I mean “I”) keep trying to get some kind of firm fix on the situation, whatever the situation is. Seven or eight sparrows? Well, does it matter? Rationally, no … but so much of life is spent trying to count those damn sparrows.
Also, I like numbers. I like numbers in general; I like arithmetic; I count things and add and subtract and multiply things all the time, just for the hell of it. Give me your phone number and I’ll tell you something interesting about the digits in, like, four seconds. “The sum of the first three digits is the product of the last two digits!” Or something. It’s a little weird. Kind of Junior Rain Man. (I do know the difference between the price of a car and the price of a candy bar, though. So your longstanding suspicion that I really should be institutionalized has not yet been entirely confirmed.)
I like numbers in poetry because they are so specific. Other things being equal, generally the more specific a poem is the more powerful it is, so numbers to me seem like high-octane gas or something for poetry.
Gabi Greve, on her mindblowingly complete haiku website, has a great page about numbers in haiku. Here are a couple of my favorites of the examples she gives:
咲花をまつ一に梅二は櫻
saku hana o matsu ichi ni umi ni wa sakurawaiting for the cherry blossoms
one is the sea
two is the cherry tree— Ishihara 石原重方
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ビタミン剤一日二錠瀧凍る
bitamiinzai ichi nichi ni joo taki kooruvitamin pills
each day two of them –
the waterfall freezes— Ono Shuka (Oono Shuka) 大野朱香
Also, Issa is great at haiku that feature numbers. (Does this surprise you? I thought not.) A few examples, all translated by David Lanoue (and if you want more you should go over to David’s spectacular database of Issa translations and type your favorite number in the search box):
three raindrops
and three or four
fireflies.
houses here and there
fly kites, three…four…
two.
three or five stars
by the time I fold it…
futon.
rainstorm–
two drops for the rice cake tub
three drops for the winnow.
lightning flash–
suddenly three people
face to face.
mid-river
on three or four stools…
evening cool.
cool air–
out of four gates
entering just one.
on four or five
slender blades of grass
autumn rain.
a five or six inch
red mandarin orange…
winter moon
and one of my favorites of all time —
first snowfall
one, two, three, four
five, six people
Interesting how many of these involve the kind of uncertainty about exact count that my own haiku does. I don’t remember whether I had read any Issa at the time I wrote it. I might have been shamelessly imitating him, or I might just have been trying to count sparrows. You try it. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
NaHaiWriMo, Week 2
8 winter shadows the color of winter hats
9 spinning in circles trying to reason with the galaxy
10 cold archive room Abe Lincoln’s ordinary horse
11 chocolate sauce dipping a toe in a sun-warmed puddle
12 lark silver bullet entering my airspace
13 clouds of the world checking their immigration status
14 oil slick nebula in embryo
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___________________
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I seem to be doing very weird things with these. I guess that’s kind of the point of this endeavor. Well, I kind of see it as the point. Experimenting, risking seeming stupid or incompetent in hopes that you’ll occasionally hit upon something interesting or worthwhile. I’ve had to force myself to be very brave and non-self-censoring this month. I keep imagining people thinking to themselves, “God, she’s gone off the deep end, hasn’t she?” Wandering away shaking their heads. Wondering if they really want to come back.
It’s interesting, though, because whenever I start to feel guilty about inflicting some trite gobbledygook on you people, it will turn out that people actually like the stuff I thought was trite gobbledygook. I mean, people with good taste, better taste than I have. I’m starting to wonder if I actually have the slightest idea what I’m doing here … Stop nodding your heads so vigorously.
Halfway through. I guess I’ll make it.
February 2 (Tidal Pool)
There has been some confusion on the part of some people about what the heck this is, exactly. It’s a paint chip.
I have a huge stack of these left over from when we were contemplating painting things in our house, but then we realized that would take time and energy, which we would rather preserve for things that contribute either to our survival or our entertainment, so we said nahhh, let’s just leave the walls in their current state of dilapidation.
But paint chips! I love them in so many ways. They’re like little tickets, or tokens, granting you entrance to a color. You can stack them, you can sort them, you can flip through them and watch a rainbow in flight. I’m always trying to think of brilliant artistic things to do with them, which is why I have a box filled with them, and pick up more every time I go to a hardware store, even though we don’t have any immediate plans to paint anything.
Then the last time I pulled them out — which was when I was preparing my present for Alegria and hauled out all my boxes of random paper scraps and ephemera that I always think I will do something brilliant and artistic with and hardly ever do — I realized: these things don’t just have colors on them, they have words on them. And not just any words, but highly evocative words, because the makers of paint chips know that you are more likely to buy paint called “Tidal Pool” than paint called, um, “Light Grayish Blue.”
Well, I have this little hobby that involves doing things with words. So I sort of went crazy using the names of colors on paint chips as haiku writing prompts. I’ve got a big stack of these now and I’m thinking of dropping by the hardware store soon for some more free inspiration. God knows I need it these days.
(And by the way? I have declared a moratorium on my writing haiku about snow for the rest of the winter. I feel like that’s all I ever write lately. So if you see any more of those around here [except those that have been previously published], remind me that I can find something else to write about, perhaps by staring at paint chips.)
January 11 (Meltwater)
meltwater
the thought that keeps going
through my mind
December 17 (River Current)
river current dividing my time between now and forever
December 16: Okay, Now It’s Frozen
liquid to solid the lake and its magic trick
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a new fear
for a new season
thin ice
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thickening ice no need to interrupt the journey
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Last week it wasn’t. This week it was. I don’t know if I’m brave enough to step out on it, yet. But there’s always next week.
Red Dragonfly 