Pure Haiku OPEN to submissions!

Just a few days left to compose and submit!

purehaiku

Welcome back to Pure Haiku!

Our new theme is UNFURLING.

Please use this beautiful painting, Unfurling, by Elisa Ang to inspire you to write 5 haiku to submit by email before 28th February 2021 at midnight, UK time.

Take a really good look at the picture. I mean, a REALLY good look. Don’t just write about what’s there, write about what’s beneath the painting. What emotion or image or memory does it awake in you? Tell me something different about this picture. Don’t just rattle off 5 haiku with the 5-7-5 syllabic line structure. Really let Elisa’s painting speak to you. Then tell me about it, in your own words. Be different. Be aware. Be inventive! Use this image as a starting point for your creative flow…

You are NOT allowed to use the words LEAF, UNFURLING, UNFURLED OR UNFURL/S in either your haiku or the titles…

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Tanka for the end of the cold

sun melts its butter
on afternoon fields wind blows
still winter sharp
dig deep into warming earth
plant spring unfold summer

For Frank Tassone’s haikai challenge. An afternoon of gardening, clearing and planting. The smell of violets was overpowering.
I cheated a bit. It isn’t cold at all now, but since Ash Wednesday isn’t a thing in these parts…

Smoke

For the dverse prompt, including the lines from The Song of Wandering Aengus by WB Yeats:

‘I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head.‘

I went out to the hazel wood, because a fire was in my head, but the fire, I took with me, and the rushing stream couldn’t quench the flames. I listened to the blackbird, but his song was out of kilter, and the sun streamed slantwise through the pale green leaves.

They say the world is spinning to its end, the heaving oceans empty of their fish are filling with our discarded plastic. I listen to the blackbird but his song is not for me.

They’re shooting in the chase, I can hear the horns and the coarse voices shouting, coarser than any dog giving tongue. As if we needed more blood. The world is drowning in it.

Listen, blackbird, to the pale-winged moths, their song is more in keeping with these end times. Hush. I hear the ocean rushing over the world’s edge.

First geese

The old man said
watch the sky
for the spring will come
on wings.

Today they came
the first geese battalion
joy in their basso profondo
flying so low
the setting sun in the delicate colours
of their feathered fuselage.

Godspeed, I shouted
waved
exulting
in their gentle majesty.

#writephoto: Dark pool

A short story for Sue Vincent’s weekly photo prompt. You’ll have to go to Sue’s blog to see the prompt as WP refuses to upload it here.

The river flows as it always did, in turbulent pools where the bank is broken by the deep stone walls. Impregnable, they always said, with the cliff behind and the river before, and my father laughed at the notion of siege.
“We have stores enough for two years within and the wells never run dry.”
When he said I was to marry the neighbouring seigneur to make our joint lands the wealthiest in the county, the fort became a prison. You vowed you would come for me, as I vowed I would be here when you did. No walls would keep me in if your arms waited on the other side.
So I was here where the river rolls, with its whirlpool of autumn leaves carried round and round in the current, trapped between buttress and bank, when you guided your boat with muffled oars silently beneath walls. I was here when you raised your sweet face and opened your arms.
You were there, below, when I climbed the parapet, a cord about my waist and tested the strength of the knot about the merlon. And I saw your face, smiling, one last brief moment before my father’s archers leapt from the tower and your smile turned to a grimace of pain and despair.
Only I am here now, watching the river. My father believes women have no courage and doesn’t even think to put a watch on me. The FitzHugh is coming tomorrow to finger the goods, the prelude to my sentence, but by then, I will be where you fell, among the autumn leaves carried round and round in the cold, clear river water beneath this wall.

Fungal waterways

For dverse.

House sits within its moat of rain water
where the salamander lives
and running grass green
and the cowshed where the toad
swims under the door
and the veil of raindrops dripping
from the eaves dripping in the attic
and inside the windows
and the places where it bubbles
up through the floor.

House sits full of the smell of water
cool and cold and we listen
to the patter on glass the rattle
down chimneys feel the stones slip
into some other world of water
and watery things.

Night is deep and well-dark
ditch-full of rain and the crow wind
and when the light returns
in the grass running down the green path
water-running will be the ragged
ghostly procession of white agaric
water-gorged and tasteless.

Scirocco

Waking to a sky
colour of weak tea

and behind the chatter
and chanting of songbirds
woodpecker drilling and drumming
wood pigeon rou-cou-couling

a profound silence
hangs
drips
smears its mud-sandy hands
about my ears.

Three Line Tales: Convergence

For Sonya’s weekly photo prompt.
photo by Raychel Sanner via Unsplash

The turbulence gathered, the spiralling winds whipping forests to a blaze, oceans to rolling mountain chains of water, and the earth opened to receive it.

All the dark matter of pain and suffering concentrated in one huge desert sucked dry of concrete and living things, drawing all roads towards it inexorably.

When all our works had hurtled to their meeting place, with wild laughter or howls of despair, and the sky poured all of its anger into the last great electric storm, the vengeful mouth yawned, drank deep and snapped shut.

Bella ciao

For the dverse prompt.

Bella, Ciao, he said
and marched away,
a grin on his face,
a grass stalk between his teeth.

He waved at the bend
in the summer-dusty road,
where the olive grove rolls
in a silver wave,
and the war swallowed him up,
spat out the bones.

Bella, Ciao, he’d said,
her partisan,
her boy, her life,
who came back dead.

The Craft 1: Jane Dougherty

Sarah Connor is doing a series of poet interviews and she has done me the great whopping honour of being her first guest. Thank you, Sarah for making me take myself seriously.

Sarah writes poems

PENTAX Digital Camera

Welcome to The Craft, my new monthly series. It’s partly a way of celebrating and uplifting some of my favourite poets, and partly a way to justify being really nosy. I’m interested in how people write, in why they write, and in what inspires them.

I’m so pleased that Jane is my first guest. Jane was one of the first poets I came across when I started my poetry blog, four years ago now. At the time she was putting out some great prompts and offering generous and helpful feedback. Through those prompts I met a group of poets who led me to my favourite sites. I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to Jane for really taking me seriously as I took my first poetic steps – like Bambi on ice, clutching at a pen for support. And now she’s here again, supporting me as…

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