#Tanka Tuesday: Belief & Joy

This erased haibun is for Colleen’s weekly challenge.

In the darkest time of the year the trees stand alone, stark and unfleshed. No hiding places among thick foliage, budding seeds and new shoots, no warm nest or drey protects from sharp winds. The world is exposed, peeled back to its heart, so easy to pierce and destroy.

Happy the sleepers

that wake in mild spring sun to

the din of green growth.

In time,

the year budding,

seeds, new shoots,

warm winds

wake spring green.

Gull glitter

This extreme haibun erased is for the Secret Keeper’s writing challenge, to use these words:

CITY | GRASS | PLAY | RANT | WATER

I have borrowed Paul Militaru’s lovely photograph again for inspiration. Thanks Paul!

On the water, sunlight plays, a steely scimitar slicing the city’s heart in two. Gulls shatter the silver mirror and send ripples flying, feather-soft and rapid as the silent fishes that dart among the frond-waving grassy pastures of the sea.

 

too bright this light

that splinters—gull plunges

into green depths

 

Water ripples

flying fishes dart

among sea splinters.

Birds and orchids

For the NaPoWriMo prompt, a warning to myself. A haibun followed by the erased poem.

 

Is it peace that falls in the green shadows with the trickling music of the birds that draws my steps deeper among the trees where sunlight flickers and wing-shapes flit? Is this where the key is hidden, beneath the heads of orchids, wild and strange, to open the final door? Feet tread, grass-swishing and bending stalks, deeper and further from the path, the road, the wide world.

I think I could live here, curl around myself like the foxes do and the winter squirrels

and all would be well, easy and without care. But in the patter of the rain, the damp where water spiders scurry and the cold that creeps from flesh to bone, I hear the sound of need, the cry to come back, the pulling in of the maternal bonds that tie so much tighter than briar and dog rose.

scent of dog roses

entangled and enchanted

sweet fiction

 

birds and orchids wild

open the path

I curl around the care and cold

the need to come back

dog roses

sweet fiction

 

Haibun erased

This is perhaps what the NaPoWriMo prompt intended. In my haibun I have put the words I kept in bold italics. This is my poem for the dverse open link night too.

Woken at four in the morning by a mad thrush singing its heart out, I watch the stars and the place where the tiny nail-clipping of a moon had been. By starlight, the field is lead-coloured, not silver, except where the thistledown dandelion heads show above the long grasses, the vetch and the flax. Bird sings alone except for the chortling of toads by the pond and the backing chorus of frogs. Why, in this darkness, when fox and stoat and weasel prowl, when owls hunt through the branches? Is it really an instinctive urge, this drama in the night, or is it uncontainable joy in the spring that has suddenly blossomed into summer?

Spring night

warm as ditch water

sings of birth.

 

 

Out, the stars,

nail-clipping moon,

silver above the long grasses.

Bird sings

of fox prowl, owl hunt—

night joy suddenly blossomed

into spring birth.