Haibun for a spring night

Trees and hedges are full of voices, shriek of jays, wild quacking of startled ducks, the frantic song contests of thrush and  blackbird. Overhead the buzzards wheel mewling and below dry leave are tossed, trampled, gathered and scattered by bird, wind and the scuttling, sidling of reptiles. A noisy time of year.

spring crackles rustles

and croons—even the night

is full of sound

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Birdsong in the dim distance

 

A din of birdsong at dusk

and the fading sun

suddenly the golden air is blue

as grass at frosty morning.

Moon hangs a silent eye

in the tree where the blackbird sang.

I wish I could touch the fiery stars

and watch from the dim distance

the spring unfold.

No sunburst

I had a go at writing a pantoum with no rhyme and no rhythm. It’s certainly a lot easier to write than a classic pantoum, and I think it shows. For the dverse open link night.

 

The thrush pours out his ceaseless song,

Spring rain falls from dull, grey skies,

No sunburst helps us to forget,

Winter is hiding in the hedge.

 

Spring rain falls from dull, grey skies.

While violence grows rank weeds in the streets,

Winter is hiding in the hedge,

With frost to nip the gold of daffodils.

 

While violence grows, rank weeds, in the streets,

Indifference creeps like oil from a slick,

With frost to nip the gold of daffodils—

The poor weep over their harrowed fields.

 

Indifference creeps like oil from a slick,

Rain, cloud and cold winds all collude;

The poor weep over their harrowed fields,

Beneath sodden clouds and averted faces.

 

Rain, cloud and cold winds all collude,

No golden sunburst helps us forget

These weeping clouds and averted faces,

Yet thrush still weaves pure beauty in his song.

Tanka for World Poetry Day

Trying to blot out everything except WIP, but it’s World Poetry Day so…

March gold and green

and in the night sky

the plough

we hold the past and future

in the palm of our hands

Yet the dark

 

All this growing and greening

spreading from root to stem

to flower

petals falling leaves unfurling

drawn sunwards

and yet the dark mud-stirred waters

still lap beneath the banks

shrouded in dead wood

ivy-festooned

where fungus grows.

Creation

The poetic hum, for dverse. I’m not sure I have one.

 

In my head there are people

and landscapes stretching chequered green

or grey-waved sea.

There are voices,

trees bow heavy with leaf

or shake out flocks of birds in the wind,

a hawk screams, children cry,

a horse whinnies in pain.

Lovers love or part or die

like the old ones, cows and dogs.

Seasons and centuries change

while I am still,

the hub,

the omphalos of this silent world,

forming and shaping words

from ghosts

from ghosts into flesh and blood

and bright sticky sap.

Life leaps

A butterfly cinquain for Colleen Chesebro’s weekly Tanka Tuesday challenge.

 

Life leaps

with bird warble

full-throated and lusty

from grass root to echoing sky

clouded

and speckled with loud skeins of geese

leaf-burst follows blossom

falling—petals

scattered.