Late Winter Haiku and Tanka
23 poems from late winter, 2022
Three attempts at exploring the same idea:
--- Garlic tips flushed up in midday heat—green fountains crisped nightly with frost. - In afternoon heat garlic rises—at daybreak frozen stiff as glass. - Afternoon—garlic blooms. Spring sunrise—garlic sparkles frozen stiff as glass.
Fruit trees, recently pruned, pre-bloom, gather wet snow in their shortened arms.
Everyone on zoom in their shoulder-rubbing homes marvels at the barn.
Another lustful jolt. My ovaries release their precious cargo.
Trilling lilt while meditating— nose whistle.
Chattering outside our bedroom window—Google reveals a screech owl. - Internet's glow shows the answer—just outside our walls a screech owl sings.
Below is a tanka—a type of Japanese poem similar to the haiku but adding two 7-syllable lines at the end, like a sonnet’s couplet.
--- Jumping time forward on clocks outside the network, offset, repeating, softly in the spring sunrise three doves coo a madrigal.
fist making evening after gloves knuckles crack
Even overnight the snow melts away—waking peeling off blankets. - Through the night snow melts. I wake hot and peel away the topmost blanket. - Midnight melt— waking, I remove the top quilt.
Quiet house in ringing birdsong— spring sunrise.
All day awaiting my box of chicks—the hen breast heat they'll never know.
South of the main barn, tangled and taller than me— wild roses arise.
Reading quietly— a beetle taps the far wall, clatters to the ground.
Beneath this room amazed at this lucky cave the crawlspace woodchuck.
Opening the box seven peeping chicks—one stands on the lifeless eighth.
Day-old chicks peep from the bathtub down the hall.
Returning the now worthless exercise bike, made in China, to wage- bound corporate laborers who cart it through the big-box mouth.
Spring meditation— in the crawlspace below me the woodchuck rustles.
Last days of winter— we dig shallow holes, fill them with fertilizer, circling around the pine who shelters us from the rain.