#Tanka Tuesday: haiku for troubled water

Une fois n’est pas coutume, as we say over here—a syllable-counted haiku for Colleen Chesebro’s #tanka tuesday challenge. I’m getting more minimalist with haiku these days.

 

light plays on water

silvering pond’s troubled depths

beneath the pike waits

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tanka for a moonlit sunset

impatient moon

rising through glowing golden

fields of sunset

with all this light no wonder

the birds will not be silent

Haibun for a father’s birthday

This haibun is in response to a fortuitous prompt from the Daily Inkling. Today is my dad’s birthday. The prompt is ‘I’m the King of the World.’

 

Today is his birthday, not was. It will always be the day he was born. He’d be an old man now, too old to remember the stories he used to tell us, the poems he wrote, the people he’d known. I’m glad he never lost any of his force, physical or intellectual. Living so far from his roots was hard enough, to dip into the sea that lapped his home shore, to feel the same bleak wind in his face. He’s there now, if only I could see him, standing legs braced against an Atlantic gale, looking down into the bay where the seals play and the gulls scream.

Wind full of voices

pours from the distant sea

salt in the wounds.

Haiku challenge: Storm & Fierce

Internet is breaking up again, so a quick post before the row starts.

For Ronovan’s haiku challenge.

 

spring rain drives

a hawk-fierce storm

of slick black plumes

 

Moonlight tanka

in the tree

a moon is humming lullabies

to the stars

rocked in light birds sleep

fox sniffs the wind

Haikai challenge: President

Frank Tassone’s prompt is to write a haikai poem about a president. This one is about Éamon de Valera.

 

after the bloodbath

of fratricidal war

your dearth of vision

 

Thoughts on writing iambic verse

All we write can be broken up into lines of ten syllables. It doesn’t make it poetry even if the word you rhyme’s at the end. It’s not all that’s at stake. And when the end word’s not even a true rhyme, all connection with the form is lost. For example, true does not rhyme with tree, nor does lost rhyme with last or with closet. Yet we persist in calling sonnet what is a collection of fourteen lines that may or may not end in a rhyme of sorts, contain ten syllables but sounds discordant. We need to learn to listen harder if we want to create verse that’s barder.

I have taken that bit of diatribe and turned it into a ‘sonnet’.

 

All we write can be broken up into

Lines of ten syllables. It doesn’t make

It poetry even if the word you

Rhyme’s at the end. It’s not all that’s at stake.

 

And when the end word’s not even a true

Rhyme, all connection with the form is lost.

For example, true does not rhyme with tree,

Nor does lost rhyme with last or with closet.

 

Yet we persist in calling sonnet what

Is a collection of fourteen lines that

May or may not end in a rhyme of sorts,

Contains ten syllables but sounds discord-

 

Ant. We need to learn to listen harder

If we want to create verse that’s barder.

 

Compare that non-sonnet, to this. That is what a sonnet should ‘sound’ like.