#Tanka Tuesday: Nest-building

A haiku for Colleen’s weekly challenge.

Photo ©David P. Howard

no time for singing

eaves aflutter with bright wings

nest-building twitter

Haiku challenge: Bright & Fight

For Ronovan’s weekly haiku challenge.

 

spring struggles

with winter gloom— we share

bright buttercup light

Haiku challenge: Elate & Hate

For Ronovan’s weekly haiku challenge. This was a hard one.

 

rising on wild wings

spring storm sings off key

while darkness grows

Haiku for a grey morning

 

grey cloud

grey grass sea sprinkled

with seed pearls

 

pheasant

coughs defiance into

the sunday silence

 

rain patters

on last year’s leaves

and this year’s snails

Haiku sequence: Changeable

 

yellow face

broad and smiling—gold-plated

sunshine flower

 

such green growth

though the wind howls grass stalks

bend not breaking

 

still it rains

not still the sky mirror

where water leaps

Flying home

Photo©Cayambe

I have just watched the first mass migration of the spring, perhaps a thousand cranes in just one of the skeins, flying in reasonably ordered formation, heading north east. Their trumpeting call is triumphant, sonorous, stay in line, don’t stray, keep in the slipstream if you’re tired.

Home calls, spring, the nest, and the mate for life to help raise the new chicks. No one is left behind, all take turns to fray a path through the winds. Only birds, but can we claim the same honour?

wild sky

cloud-streaked blue rain-rippled

ocean of feathers

Restless night

Last night, for the first two hours after taking a pain killer, I dipped in and out of half-sleep, woken by the same imperative repeated over and over—don’t forget two threads of the story, the two characters in a boat, the other two on the mountain, remember how the threads pull together.

Two hours of this anxiety that I might forget the vital elements of the plot of the story plagued me before I woke completely, the pain too bad to sleep and the anxiety still there.

on the water

a boat with swan’s wings

dream-journey

But what is the story? Not one that I am writing. Who are the two people in the boat? What is their relationship with the two climbing the mountain? I wish I knew. Perhaps it is a story waiting to be written, the voice urging me to remember, the voice of what we call the Muse.

And what if I were to write the two wandering threads?

snow

wreathes the mountain

swan’s wings