Early Fall Haiku and Short Poems
14 poems from early fall, 2024
Mind returning home— releasing milkweed tassels into open sky.
One thought repelling another—entwined milkweed in turbulent flight.
Unfounded theories— milkweed tassel disappears into cloudless sky.
Perhaps you will have noticed the several year gap between the last grouping of poems and this one. The cause of this was two chronic injuries—hypertonic pelvic floor being the first and cervical dystonia being the second. In shorter terms: tailbone pain and neck pain. The first took away my will to write, the second took away my physical ability to write for nearly a year (it was a very severe neck injury). When I finally began to recover, I tentatively started writing again. Much of this was done sitting in our backyard watching the fields around our farmhouse until the idea for a short poem arrived.
--- The pain briefly ebbs— neighboring field full of moths, clouds allow some sun.
Three fields—alfalfa, wheat, sky—stitched together by messy clumps of trees.
Pain drifts down its course— vibrant fields, green and golden, deepen under clouds.
Monumental oak— unaware of its presence in our household myths.
These next two poems are a bit experimental. There is the idea in Buddhist meditation of emulating a mountain—you are the mountain, your thoughts are the weather around the mountain, coming and going, ultimately impermanent. As I was sitting in our backyard one afternoon I noticed that the turkey buzzards who live in the area, as they glide along in the sky, formed an inverted V with their bodies, which is something like the shape of an upside-down mountain. I made the tenuous connection to this meditation teaching, and the following poems were the result.
--- Autumn’s sunshine gusts— different kind of mountain, vultures tip and glide. - Vultures tip and glide on autumn’s sunshine gusts—each a floating mountain.
Fall brings cooler mornings and evenings, and hence we get out our winter shoes.
--- Interval between rain showers—plucking cobwebs from the warmer shoes.
Branch bobbing, swaying— a pause and then emerges the buoyant squirrel.
Voice and keyboard pause— above the house, geese singing in the silent sky.
Every autumn hue held high in the branches, birds shriek and cheap—this too.
Nothing but doves in the sky this perfect autumn day, leaves the color of gourds and rust and tiny black gnats seek my eyes unceasingly, my neck hurts, in the trees the blackbirds call the call that reminds me of past springs in the garden I can no longer keep.