Polar Vortex POV

I suspected that mustering haiku poets to write lots of polar vortex poems would act as a kind of voodoo spell to chase the polar vortex away and it looks like I was right, because the temperature has actually been above freezing here for several days in a row and I’m not sure that’s happened since early December. Of course, we’re well into March now so I suppose it’s just barely conceivable that it would have warmed up eventually anyway, but I’m going with the “breath of poetic fire” theory. I hope it’s warmer where you are, too, or cooler, or wetter, or dryer, or whatever condition is most desirable meteorologically wherever you reside.  Thanks to all who contributed for helping out!

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martini–
I make my own
polar vortex
.
the snow hollow
surrounding an evergreen;
polar vortex

.–Michael Nickels-Wisdom

.

Polar vortex even a whisper is too loud.

— John Ashton

.

the polar vortex
nanoneedles my tattoo
of the wind

–Peter Yovu

.

polar vortex
distant coyotes
change key

polar vortex
sliding through
the roundabout

–David McKee

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your look
as i take the last slice
polar vortex

–Sondra Byrnes

.

me and you
coexisting warmth and cold
polar vortex

–Russell Littlecreek

.

polar vortex —
I forget that I forgot to
rake the leaves

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the falling fence (polar vortex) frozen falling down

–Angie Werren

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what I thought     polar vortex     what is

.
polar vortex
circling spring down
the drain

–Christina Nguyen

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polar vortex the sidewalk singer’s smack talk

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polar vortex
somewhere a white bear
swimming in circles

–Peter Newton

.

polar vortex
the plastic covered windows
sigh

–Heather Jagman

.

polar vortex —
the neighbor’s pond freezes
for the first time

–Julie Bloss Kelsey

.

antimatter–
lost in a polar
vortex

–Marianne Paul

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–Marianne Paul

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Arcs the Beach Grasses Etch in Sand

I keep thinking about poetry being an agent of transformation. One is a different person—one’s life is changed—after reading a poem. Even a bad poem, full of clichés and dud line breaks and flat diction. One looks up from such a poem and is surprised to be free after that little imprisonment. That’s a transformation of a sort. But a fine poem, a poem that immediately permeates one’s being, a poem which, after being read, makes the reader look around and suddenly need to reassess the room, the world—that’s why those of us who read poetry read poetry. As for those of us who write poetry—once, just once, we say to ourselves, let me write one of those world-shifters. Let me be someone’s “suddenly I see” or “oh, that’s name of that squiggly feeling I have always felt” or “so now I need to relearn how to breathe.”

polar vortex
I make my husband drive me
to the shore

–Jean LeBlanc

.

this polar vortex
a towel snap to my solar
plexus

*

polar vortex
too numb for color
on the maps

–Rick Daddario

.

sick of winter–
the polar vortex
heads south

–Terri L. French

.

polar vortex
what isn’t frozen
isn’t

 –Gayle Bull

.

polar vortex cracks in moon blues.

.

a lowing in me polar vortex

–Alegria Imperial

.

polar vortex
his voice cracks
for the first time

.

polar vortex
penetrated
in silence

–Melissa Allen

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Across the Haikuverse, No. 29: The Not-Haiku Edition

It is not strictly true that there is no haiku here. There’s a bunch of haiku. There’s just a lot of other stuff too. It’s all poetry, though. Short poetry. Relatively short. It all makes me happy, okay?

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how haiku is different from other kinds of poetry and wondering how different it is, exactly, and whether and what writers of haiku can learn from other kinds of poetry about how to write haiku. I know there’s a school of thought that haiku is haiku and Western poetry is Western poetry and ne’er the twain shall meet. That Western poems employ all kinds of tricky, slippery literary devices so their meanings are hidden in a miasma of metaphor, whereas haiku are clear as water and they mean just what they say they mean.

I wonder, I wonder. I’m not sure I believe any more that any particular linguistic feature is absolutely necessary to haiku, except extreme brevity, or that any particular linguistic feature is absolutely foreign to it. I think the salient feature of haiku is an almost painfully heightened awareness of some feature of the universe. I could say something about connections, too, and about concreteness, and perhaps about some sort of sense of the existence of time.

But basically, if I don’t feel, when I read haiku, as if my chin has been grabbed and my attention insistently focused on something outside my own skull, then I don’t feel as if the poem has done its job. And you can achieve that effect with very plain and unmetaphorical language or you can achieve it with metaphor or personification or literary allusions or surrealism or wordplay or pretty much anything else in the bag of tricks that Westerners use, that anybody in the world uses, to direct the attention of the poetry-reading public.

So if you’re going to write haiku — and we are — it seems wise to be aware, to stay always aware, of the full range of options available to poets to describe the universe they experience. Even if you choose not to use many, or most, of those options, at least you know what you’re not using, and hopefully why. You also might realize that something you need to say needs to be said in not-haiku. It’s been known to happen.

________________________________________________________________________

Poetry. It’s All Good.

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— Johannes S. H. Bjerg, 3ournals and frags

Lately Johannes has been on a roll with these parallel poems of his: two poems running side by side, intertwined but able to stand independently. If you find this one interesting I recommend you dig around over at 3ournals and frags to see what else you can find, it’s a bit of a treasure chest over there.

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暮れそめてにはかに暮れぬ梅林　　　日野草城

kuresomete niwakani kurenu umebayashi

sun starts to set…
a plum grove suddenly
grows dark

—Sojo Hino, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World

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OCDC – mixing hard rock aesthetics with an anxiety disorder*

riff 
spliff 
& 
dry ice 
precise

Not to mention three lines of lemon sherbet, each exactly 294 millimetres long, on a mirror, and a bowl of red M&Ms

[*by special request]

— Marie Marshall, kvenna rad

.

I found a lion’s mane in our old shed
made of string and raffia
when we were young we used to chase antelope
I have scars on my knees*

— Kaspalita, a handful of stones

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the bride posin
bi the watterside  –  a swan
gaes intil the derk burn

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the bride posing
on the riverbank  –  a swan
enters the dark stream

–John McDonald, zen speug

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⅔ written
damn
my life
doesn’t really work
in the 1st person

–Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked

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signs of spring
one day rhyming
with the next

–William Sorlien, Haiku Bandit Society

.

–Aditya Bahl, dipping butterflies

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a red apple
a green apple
on top of the table

— Shiki, translated by Burton Watson, R’r Blog

Over on the R’r [Roadrunner] Blog, Scott Metz put together a whole applepalooza of haiku about apples, which I highly recommend you take a look at.

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all the way
around the oak tree
no squirrel

— John Hawk, DailyHaiku 3/30/2012

.

— Johannes S. H. Bjerg, Scented Dust

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rick of new-mown hay
someone left the gate open
a little horse flew
the wildest urgent creature
between the vault of my ribs

–Alan Segal (“old pajamas”), old pajamas: from the dirt hut

_______________________________________________________________

Blogged

Some more words of wisdom from the R’r Blog… about cooking and haiku.

“Tradition is everything. . . . The press . . . they love to separate avant-garde from tradition. At the end they are not two things. They are the same thing. . . . There’s only two kinds of cooking: the bad cooking and the good cooking. What happens is if we forget our traditions, if we don’t keep looking to the past, it’s very difficult to understand who you are, and even more difficult to be looking to the future.”

— José Andrés, chef and owner of minibar, Zaytinya & é & teacher, with Ferran Adrià, of culinary physics at Harvard University

.

To expand a little on what I wrote up top about the relationship between haiku and “regular” poetry… Ron Silliman, over on his blog about contemporary poetry, has written a very interesting consideration of contemporary haiku as seen in the pages of three books — the anthology Haiku 21 (which I’m going to review soon, I swear), John Martone’s ksana (ditto), and Jim Kacian’s long after (tritto).

Silliman is not a haiku poet — he writes long, very long poetry, as a matter of fact — but he is sympathetic to haiku, or more or less sympathetic; he eyes it a bit skeptically, but lovingly. (Entertainingly, he is very bemused that none of the poems in Haiku 21 have titles. Um, really? That’s the oddest thing about haiku for you? That ten-word poems don’t have titles? I don’t know, maybe we do have some kind of giant blind spot there and haiku could rock titles just fine, but they just seem kind of … unnecessary.)

Anyway. I feel indulgent toward Silliman because he loves John Martone and so do I — I could say more about that and I will, I will. His review is thoughtful and helpful, check it out.

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David Marshall wrote a haiku every day for a while and that made me really happy, and now he’s writing weekly (or so) essays and they make me really happy too.

“When I was writing a haiku a day, I hit upon an idea I could never express properly in that form. What if every haiku about a bird, a tree, a swinging backhoe, or a boulder blocking a path set that thing aflame—what if observing it made it burn with eternal fire? What would the world look like, blazing with attention? What might be left cool and untouched?”

— David Marshall, “One Essay With Separate Titles” from Signals to Attend

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______________________________________________________________

Journaled

Oh, Modern Haiku, how I love you…

Some meditations on light and dark from issue 43.1.

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one bird sings inside another autumn dusk

— Francine Banwarth

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on the edge of a forest though I tried to avoid it

— David Boyer

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a Coleman lantern
lighting the compromise
quarter moon

— Cherie Hunter Day

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all that dark matter        white peony

— Billie Dee

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deep fall–
sparrows adding
color to the trees

— Bill Pauly

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trying to switch on a light that already is late October

— Alison Williams

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one road in,
one road out–
late winter

— Jeffrey Woodward

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Ribbons 7.4. Tanka. Yes.

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I hold a slice
of freshly cut maple
wondering
whether to lacquer the wood
or burn it to tracelessness

— hortensia anderson

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it is taking
all my life
to understand
what is real —
spring begins

— Marilyn Hazelton

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hidden
by the maples’ red curtain
six kids
two dogs and a pending
foreclosure

— Christina Nguyen

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awake
during the procedure–
a tender light
wends its way
through my intestines

— Sheila Sondik

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Lilliput Review #184. If you haven’t seen Lillie before, please go over and visit Don Wentworth and order a copy or two, or ten. They cost a buck, unless you buy five or more, in which case they cost even less. There is no possible way you will ever find a lower cost-to-value ratio for poetry.

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white flesh peaches

— Renee Albert

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Prairie Dog Spoken Here

When speaking of things
you might desire but hesitate to do,
change all your “but”s to “and”s and
all your “asteroid”s to “VW van”s.

— Wayne Hogan

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into
my
nightly
coffin
of bone

— George Swede

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__________________________________________________________________________

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What If This Poem Didn’t Have a Title?

moonrise 
the wind stops

at the window
the face of
a disappointed man

—not enough
time now—

for all his
belief systems
to catch on

fire

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Dragonfly Dreams

Did I have any idea what I was getting myself into when I announced this topic? No, I did not. I had no idea that so many people would send me so much varied and amazing poetry about dragonflies. Just as I had no idea there were so many kinds of dragonflies until I started doing a little (okay, a lot) of research…

I’ll launch into the poetry in a minute, but first off, for those among you who like me have to know every. single. thing. there is to know. about something before you can possibly just enjoy reading about it (yes, we are annoying)… here is the Wikipedia article on dragonflies (which fascinatingly contains an entire section on the role dragonflies play in Japanese culture and even references haiku) and here is the page on dragonfly kigo from Gabi Greve’s World Kigo Database.

Okay, I’ll shut up now and let you enjoy this dream of dragonflies.

_________________________________________________________________________

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(Photo by Jay Otto)

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aki no ki no akatombo ni sadamarinu

The beginning of autumn,
Decided
By the red dragon-fly.

— Shirao, translated by R.H. Blyth
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toogarashi hane o tsukereba akatonbo

red pepper
put wings on it
red dragonfly

— Basho, translated by Patricia Donegan

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(Photo by Jay Otto)

a dragonfly lands
on a stranded paper boat…
summer’s end

— Polona Oblak, Crows and Daisies

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within his armful
of raked leaves
this lifeless dragonfly

— Kirsten Cliff, Swimming in Lines of Haiku

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(Artwork and poetry by Rick Daddario, 19 Planets)

dragonflies
the soft blur of time
in another land

.

(Photo by Jay Otto)

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out of myself just briefly dragonfly

.
adding a touch
of blue to the breeze –
dragonfly
(Magnapoets Issue 4 July 2009)

.
fading light –
everything the dragonfly
has to say

— Paul Smith, Paper Moon

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(Artwork by Amy Smith, The Spider Tribe’s Blog)

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a crimson darter
skims the mirror-lake…
your lips on mine
tomorrow
may never come
.

twisting and turning
a dragonfly splits
a ray of light …
he says he loves me
in his own way

(Simply Haiku Winter 2011)
.

catching
the blue eye of the breeze
dragonfly

(Simply Haiku Spring 2011)

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— Claire Everett, At the Edge of Dreams

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(Photo by Jay Otto)

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on the water lily
remains of a dragonfly
morning stillness

(Evergreen English Haiku, 1995)
.

from sedge
to sedge to sedge
dragonfly
.

with a few brushstrokes the dragonfly comes alive
.

autumn dragonfly
waning
like the moon
a few scarlet leaves
silently fall
.

— Pamela A. Babusci

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(Artwork by Rick Daddario, 19 Planets)

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Dragonfly rising
everything shining
in the wind
.

Gold dragonflies
crisscross the air in silence:
summer sunset
.

A cirrus sky
one hundred dark dragonflies
with golden wings

.

— Kris Lindbeck, Haiku Etc.

.

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(Photo by Jay Otto)

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The dragon-fly,
It tried in vain to settle
On a blade of grass.

— Basho, translated by R.H. Blyth
.

The dragon-fly
Perches on the stick
That strikes at him.

— Kohyo, translated by R.H. Blyth
.

the instant it flies up
a dragonfly
loses its shadow

— Inahata Teiko (1931-), translated by Makoto Ueda

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(Artwork by Rick Daddario, 19 Planets)

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red dragonfly
on my shoulder, what
rank do I have?
.

spiderweb down,
a damselfly touches
my lips

— Michael Nickels-Wisdom
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born in the year
of the dragon-
fly!

— Mary Ahearn

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(Photo by Jay Otto)

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sunset
from the tip of my shoe
the red dragonfly

(South by Southeast 18:2)

 

dew on grasses
the dragonflies
are gone
.

in a wrinkle
of light
dragonfly
.

— Donna Fleischer, word pond

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(Poetry by Melissa Allen; illustration clip art)

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through and through the gate dragonfly

— Melissa Allen

.

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coupling dragonflies
at break-neck speed—
HOT!

(Modern Haiku 35.1)

— Susan Diridoni

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(Photo by Jay Otto)

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on the dried husk
that was an iris blossom
black dragonfly
.

we came here
seeking solitude
the loon
the dragonfly
and the speedboat

— Christina Nguyen, A wish for the sky…

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(Artwork by Kitagawa Utamaro: “Red Dragonfly and Locust [Aka tonbo and Inago]”, from Picture Book of Selected Insects with Crazy Poems [Ehon Mushi Erabi]). From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.)

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this brief life a dragonfly
.

dragonfly
where there is water
a path
.
— angie werren, feathers

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tombô ya ni shaku tonde wa mata ni shaku

dragonfly–
flying two feet
then two feet more

— Issa, translated by David G. Lanoue

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(Photo by Jay Otto)

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a break in the rain…
the stillness
of the dragonfly

— sanjuktaa, wild berries

.

dragonfly—
how much of me
do you see?

— Alegria Imperial, jornales

.

noonday heat
dragonflies slice
the still air

(South by Southeast Vol. 12 #1)

— T.D. Ingram, @haikujots (on twitter)

.

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evening breeze
teetering on its perch
a red dragonfly



(Haiku Pix Review, summer 2011)

.— G.R. LeBlanc, Berry Blue Haiku

.

high notes
a red dragonfly skims
across the sound

— Margaret Dornaus, Haiku-Doodle

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(Haiga by Polona Oblak, Crows and Daisies)

.

the heat
between downpours
blue dragonflies

— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked

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Steel blue flash
flies wing
drifts
— Robert Mullen

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dragonfly dreams
the hospital intercom
repeats her name
.
with the password
to her sanity
darting dragonfly
.
iridescent dragonfly
hard to see
how her Ph.D. matters
.
tell me the old stories
one last time
convalescent dragonfly
.
discharge papers
the dragonfly returns home
on new meds
.
letting go of her walker
she lifts into the night sky
dragonfly
.
— Susan Antolin, Artichoke Season

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Multimedia Interlude:

Sick of everything around here being flat and quiet?  I found some moving stuff that makes noise for you too.

• First, there’s this amazing (very) short film by Paul Kroeker of the last moments of a dragonfly’s life, which I discovered via Donna Fleischer at word pond. It’s set to music and is incredibly compelling:

http://www.petapixel.com/2011/08/11/spontaneous-and-creative-short-film-of-a-dying-dragonfly-shot-with-a-canon-7d/

• Second, there are several versions of the well-known Japanese folk song (I mean, well-known to the Japanese) Aka Tombo, which means “Red Dragonfly.” This is apparently an indispensable part of every Japanese child’s upbringing. There are an almost infinite number of variations of this on YouTube so if these four aren’t enough for you, feel free to go noodling around over there looking for more.

Female vocalists

Male vocalists

Instrumental

With upbeat dance backing track added

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and on this general theme…

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perched on bamboo grass
the low notes
of a dragonfly

(Haiku inspired by Tif Holmes’s Photo-Haiku Project:  http://tifholmesphotography.com/cphp/2011/07/july-2011-series-entry-11/)

— Kathy Nguyen (A~Lotus), Poetry by Lotus

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for when even
the music stops—
dragonfly wings

— Aubrie Cox, Yay words!

.

(Photo by Jay Otto)

.

mid-morning
a dragonfly and I
bound for Mississippi
.

in and out of view
the computer-drawn dragonfly
on the web page

— Tzetzka Ilieva
.

dragonfly
at 60 miles per hour
those giant eyes

— Johnny Baranski

.

(Photo by Jay Otto)

.

first impressions
a dragonfly hovers
before landing

— Cara Holman, Prose Posies

.

.

.

.

— Linda Papanicolaou, Haiga Online

.

In this forest glade
The snail gone, a dragonfly lights
On the mushroom cap

— P. Allen

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‘Oh!  Catch it!’

‘I heard they eat their own tails’

When I was a child, living on an Air Force base in Okinawa, it was a common belief, among the elementary school set, a dragonfly would eat itself if you caught it and fed it its own tail.  I looked online and didn’t find any references to this notion so maybe we were all sniffing the good Japanese glue.

Anyhow, even though we constantly snagged lizards and grasshoppers and cicadas, I never saw any one ever catch a dragonfly, as common as they were.

dragonfly
we play in the puddles
afraid to get close

— Steve Mitchell, Heed Not Steve

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(Photo by Jay Otto)

.

dragonfly—
wings vibrating
on the rock face
(From the sequence “Ten Haiku: For the Dodge Tenth Anniversary Hike” in The Monkey’s Face)

dragonfly
on my fingernail
looks at me
(From Wind in the Long Grass, edited by William J. Higginson [Simon & Schuster, Books for Young Readers, 1991])

— Penny Harter, Penny Harter homepage,  A Poet’s Alphabestiary, Etc.

.

An old tree
No bud and no leaf
full of dragonflies.

— @vonguyenphong22 (on Twitter)

.

.

neti neti
a dragonfly hums
raga Megh
(raga Megh(a)=a raga for the monsoon season. Neti neti= a key expression from the Upanishads: “not this nor this” or “not this nor that” alluding to the essence of things.)
.

”the sky’s gone out”
on the radio – and then
a dragonfly
.

dragonfly –
I mark an unpaid bill
“later”

— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger

.

(Photo by Melissa Allen)

.

in and out the reeds
a blue dragonfly
mother keeps sewing
.

stitching
water and sky together
–       damselflies

— Paganini Jones, http://www.pathetic.org/library/5644

.

boys playing games
stones miss the darning needle

— Jim Sullivan, haiku and commentary and tales
.

dragonfly heading to the lemon hanging in the sun

— Gene Myers, genemyers.com, @myersgene (on Twitter)

.

(Artwork by Kitagawa Utamaro, “Dragonfly and Butterfly,” from A Selection of Insects)

.

bluetail damselfly
escapes the empty cottage
where children once played
(1st place Kiyoshi Tokutomi Memorial Haiku Contest 2009)
.

on the bus
to the children’s museum
first dragonfly

— Roberta Beary, Roberta Beary

.

flitting idly
from flower to flower
a blue damsel
lights upon the lotus
unfolding iridescence

— Margaret Dornaus, Haiku-Doodle

.

(Photo by Jay Otto)

.

dark waters
a dragonfly dreaming
its reflection
.

iridescent wings
the flying parts of
the dragon

— Stella Pierides, Stella Pierides
.

silhouetted dragonfly
reeds pierce the moon
(The Mainichi Daily News, May 30, 2009)

— Martin Gottlieb Cohen

Mushroom Harvest

Wow. You people are amazing. I say “Mushroom haiku,” you say “How many?” A lot, that’s how many. My mushroom craving has now been completely satisfied. I’m not gonna go on a whole lot more than that because … wow. You speak for yourself, I think. Thank you.

(Just a quick link for those of you who like your mushrooms with more scholarship: The mushroom kigo page from Gabi Greve’s World Kigo Database)

— Terri L. French,  The Mulling Muse, first published Contemporary Haibun, Volume 12

6 AM moon –
out of the still dark grasses
one white mushroom

— sanjuktaa

Unlike the mushroom
A snail moves to the shadows
In a forest glade

— P. Allen

(Photo: Melissa Allen)

fog rising –
mushrooms push aside
a bed of pine needles

(The Heron’s Nest VI:11, 2004)

— Curtis Dunlap, The Tobacco Road Poet

(Artwork: Rick Daddario, 19 Planets)

a tree falls
only the wood ear
listens

— Angie Werren, feathers

dry season
the earth not breaking
for the mushroom

— Mike Montreuil

(Photo: Jay Otto)

boiling herbs—
the mushrooms we gathered
darkening

warm cabbage
mushrooms—only wind
at the door

— Penny Harter, Penny Harter homepage,  A Poet’s Alphabestiary, Etc.

sudden storm
the mushrooms’ umbrellas
overflowing on the grill

— Tzetzka Ilieva

moonshine
a fairy circle lights
the pine forest

— Margaret Dornaus, Haiku-Doodle

fairy rings
wishing for the rain
to stop

— Christina Nguyen, A wish for the sky…

(Photo: Jay Otto)

Sticking on the mushroom,
The leaf
Of some unknown tree.

— Basho, translated by R.H. Blyth

(Now that you have read this, it is very important that you watch this YouTube video of John Cage discussing this haiku.)

Mushroom-hunting;
Raising my head,–
The moon over the peak.

— Buson, translated by R.H. Blyth

one by one
ignored by people…
mushrooms

— Issa, translated by David G. Lanoue

My voice
Becomes the wind;
Mushroom-hunting.

— Shiki, translated by R.H. Blyth

pine mushrooms
live a thousand years
in one autumn

— Den Sutejo (1633-1698), translated by Makoto Ueda

(Artwork: Rick Daddario, 19 Planets)

mushroom garden-
in the damp,dark corner
full moon

magic mushrooms—
under the duvet I find
stars

dark cloud–
from the primordium
a billowing mushroom

— Stella Pierides, Stella Pierides

(Photo: Jay Otto)

a million puffball spores
dance across my map

— Norman Darlington
First published in Albatross (2007) as a verse of the Triparshva renku ‘A Bowl of Oranges’

garden in shade and fog
mushrooms grow
where something dies damp

— Jim (Sully) Sullivan, haiku and commentary and tales

to a mushroom:
wish i were
a toad

overnight rain–
and your head expands
into a mushroom

— Alegria Imperial, jornales

— Terri L. and Raymond French, The Mulling Muse, first published in Haiga Online Family Haiga Challenge, issue 11-2

asphalt and concrete
but I know a place near here
that smells like mushrooms

— @jmrowland

in this heat
hunting for mushrooms
with help

— Steve Mitchell, Heed Not Steve

high noon –
seeking shelter under the mushroom
its shadow

— Kat Creighton

 

(Photo: Jay Otto)

sunrise service;
blue meanies
at the potluck

— Johnny Baranski

Fearless mushroom
uppercuts
snarling hyena.

— Robert Mullen, Golden Giraffes Riding Scarlet Flamingos Through the Desert of Forever

roadside stand
the chanterelle seller’s
orange crocs

— Polona Oblak, Crows and Daisies

(Photo: Jay Otto)

The following three haiku are from Penny Harter’s chapbook The Monkey’s Face, published by From Here Press in 1987.

just missing
the mushrooms
among stones

— Penny Harter, from the sequence “After the Hike”

counting mushrooms
in my basket—
numb fingers

— Penny Harter, from the sequence “Snow Finished”

under the mushrooms
the bones of
a field mouse

— Penny Harter, from the sequence “Home Village”

Penny Harter homepage,  A Poet’s Alphabestiary, Etc.

(Artwork: Rick Daddario, 19 Planets)

winter cemetery:
careful to tread between
the headstones
& these small clusters
of white mushrooms

— Kirsten Cliff, Swimming in Lines of Haiku

in the shadows
the child stomping mushrooms
smiles

— Penny Harter, revised version of a haiku from The Monkey’s Face (cited above)

crushing the year’s
first mushroom…
the laughing child

— Issa, translated by David G. Lanoue

A word of explanation here: Penny wrote (or rewrote) her haiku above as a kind of experiment in response to my mushroom challenge — the original featured a child “squashing insects” rather than “stomping mushrooms.” She had no knowledge of the Issa haiku until I discovered it shortly after receiving her haiku and showed it to her. As Penny says, “It is both a fun coincidence—and a bit eerie, but then I’m used to eerie coincidences.”

(Photo: Jay Otto)

After the rain
they come out
parasol shrooms.

A circle of toadstools-
what’s left to do
but dance?

Eating his lunch
on a tombstone
mushroom hunter.

No mushrooms there
the hunter gives the log
another good kick.

— Alexis Rotella, Alexis Rotella’s Blog

(Photo: Melissa Allen. Artwork: Kimberly Sherrod.)

first mushrooms
the children steal
each other’s hats

after crashing into the rocks strange and beautiful mushrooms

mushrooms the flesh of rain

— Melissa Allen

(Photo: Jay Otto)

mushrooms
the door
ajar

— Terry O’Connor