Category Archives: Blog

Blog, Haiku, Other Writers

Per Diem Haiku on the theme of Hands

This October, continuing the The Haiku Foundation Per Diem: Daily Haiku series, Ruth Yarrow packs a punch with a collection to delight the heart.

Ruth’s wonderfully touching, and humorous collection is “Hands-On.”  Hands? Yes, hands. This is what she offers by way of an introduction:

“We are a species heavily dependent on our eyes, especially for connection with others and world around us.  But our hands also connect, and that connection often reaches the heart.  Right now my beloved mother-in-law, who doesn’t see well, is dying, and when you approach her, she reaches out her thin hand to connect.  These haiku about hands touch emotion.  They range from humor, as in Randy Brooks’ hand in the cookie jar, to sadness, as in Cherie Hunter Day feeling the weight and warmth of her dying dog’s collar. They include fear, as in John Stevenson’s shiver at a warm hand before diagnosis, sex, as in Sari Grandstaff’s total attention to the hand on her thigh, and even exasperation or anger, as in Kenneth Elba Carrier’s deaf man grabbing at the other’s hands.”

You can read the whole post by clicking here

Gabi Greve has a number of haiku on Hands too; see her blog Haiku and Happiness, where she features the THF Per Diem on Hands. Please click here

Follow the THF on twitter: https://twitter.com/haikufound

And start the day right: pick up your first haiku by clicking here

 

 

 

100 Days of Summer, Blog, News

100 Thousand Poets for Change 2012

Today, 29 September 2012, is the day when 100 Thousand Poets for Change gather online, in person, and in print to celebrate poetry, art and music, and to promote social, environmental, and political change.

If you happen to be in Munich today, drop by the Munich Readery, the largest and friendliest secondhand bookstore in Germany. They will be hosting an evening of readings and performances from 19:00 – 22:00.

In observance of today’s 100 Thousand Poets for Change, I offer the following  prose poem: The Beach at Blakeney Point, first published in the North London Writers and Poets Anthology Gathering Diamonds from the Well, 2007.

The Beach at Blakeney Point

Hard as I try, I can’t recall the beach at Blakeney Point. Images blend and memories merge – this beach with that at Holkham, with Morston, Burnham Overy and Brancaster Staith.

I only see an expanse in my mental map, the horizon shimmer, Old Lifeboat House looking stern from afar. The salt marsh carpet, creeks, dunes and samphire. Now it is summer. Blue above and below, and the sharp pinpricks of the flying sand. Now it is winter. The saltings dim grey and dirty brown, freezing crystals on the scrub.

Hard as I try. My first walk to the Point fromCleyBeach. Before I knew about tide tables, I set off walking the deep shingle spit, bruising calves and blackening nails. I did reach the end, the sea and the tern’s nests. The feeling of space and the sense of infinity. The tide withdrew to sea while I rested, leaving casts of lugworms, deserts of sand behind. Buccinum and Hydrobia shells. Leaving the bottom of the sea to me. Its cruelty.

A baby seal washed up dead, lying in pools of water, alongside sparkling stones and Flustra fronds the colour of hope. Why, where is the…, what can I…? Too late. It was, I was, too late. I walked back barefoot, the seal receding with each step, ebbing away. The boom of the sea and the spray. The wind sculpted sounds, I licked salt off my lips.

Hard as I try. Sea holly, sandwort and sand sedge cling to shifting dunes. I can’t remember the beach at Blakeney Point. Only that seal, that wind, and my impotence.

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76/100 Days of Summer

For Blakeny Point, see here

The Beach at Blakeney Point, in Gathering Diamonds from the Well, ed. Brian Docherty, Laurence Scott, and Katie Willis (London: New Gallery Books 2007)

Blog, Haiku, NaHaiWriMo

August 2012 NaHaiWriMo

August was a great month for the NaHaiWriMo community. Every day, each single day of the month, a different haiku poet offered a prompt. Wonderful haiku were written, and shared, and the month whizzed by before we knew it. Well, before I knew it. But we have the poems; and the prompts.

The list of the thirty one prompts for the month of August can be found by clicking here

For the poems, alas, you have to go back to the Facebook timeline…Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an easier way?

aros, Blog, Haiku, News

‘soul boat’ and other recent ku

A few more haiku from recent contests/publications:

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soul boat —

waves of silence

in gold leaf

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Marisova Memorial kukai 2012

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short-lived

shine of a melon seed

your words

A Hundred Gourds, 1:4, Sept 2012,  p7

http://ahundredgourds.haikuhut.com/ahg14/haiku07.html

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nest building –

on the other side of the fence

a deeper blue

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2nd Haiku My Photo Challenge

blossomrain.blogspot.com, Chrissi Villa

100 Days of Summer, aros, Blog, Haiku, NaHaiWriMo

‘summer epic’ #13 September 2012

3 Comments

summer epic —

a baobab tree

on the Southbank

southbank fabric tree

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NaHaiWriMo prompt: Mythology

62/100 Days of Summer

2nd annual 30 Days of Haiga, 19 Planets blog (Read Rick Daddario’s prose piece about his 14/30 Days of Haiga!)

Inspired by the fabric tree, part of the summer 2012 Festival of the World, Southbank Centre. Info about the fabric tree here

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100 Days of Summer, aros, Blog, Haiku, NaHaiWriMo

‘salty breeze’ #11 September 2012

2 Comments

salty breeze

the lull in the tide

just before the turn

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NaHaiWriMo prompt: sensual

61/100 Days of Summer

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Looking for an image for this area (Blakeney Point, North Norfolk, UK), I came across a wonderful blog:

Norfolk Birders Norfolk Birdwatching and beyond. This picture is a Google image included in this blog. Haiku poets everywhere, visit and enjoy!