Remember the snow? The white stuff? Well, here it is in my photo from last December included in MacQueen’s Quinterly So happy to see it in this wonderful journal together with two of my haiku. Thank you to editor Clare MacQueen!
.winter wonderland
how many snowflakes
to magic
new snow...
the sound only silence
makes
Happy to see my four senryu make it to MacQueen’s Quinterly! Many thanks to the editor Clare MacQueen!
[Four Senryu]
January storm
my neighbor’s greenhouse
flying past
:::
Monday blues...
last week’s special offer
no longer special
:::
overcast day
the muted colors
of hope
:::
when the going gets tough
the feel of your hand
in mine
*
In Frogpond 46.3, Autumn 2023
Happy to see my haibun “Sky Ponds-Himmelsweicher” appear in Contemporary Haibun Online 19.2
I found out about the bomb craters in the Augsburg city forest during a walk with my Parkinson’s walking group. Marvelous recovery of a wounded landscape, and people. And apt for our own situation of struggling with progressive disease.
The Siebentischwald, on the edge of Augsburg, acts as the lung of the city. Lush green vegetation crisscrossed by water channels and dotted by silent ponds makes this forest the life force of Augsburg. It turns out it is also the repository of an interesting piece of the city’s history: the forest floor bearing the scars of thousands of bombs that were dropped on it towards the end of World War II.
On my morning walk with my Parkinson’s group, in this peaceful, green oasis, pierced by high-pitched peacock cries from the adjacent Zoo, I come across oval ponds and other depressions filled with vegetation. I am told they are Bombenkrater, the remnants of craters formed by aerial bombing.
The proximity to the munitions manufacturer Messerschmitt meant that bombs often landed in the forest. However, the massive bombing raid in February 1944 literally dug up the forest floor, leaving numerous wounds on the landscape. In recent years, a public charity transformed some of these craters into ponds brimming with life.
cool forest shade. . .
lingering by the sky ponds
heat from the past
June 29, 2023 (Mainichi Japan)
they take you for granted ... dandelions
Happy to have this haiku selected by Dhugal J. Lindsay for The Mainichi newspaper. It appeared on Japan’s Daily on the 29th of June 2023.
A Cluster of Lights is here!
This beautiful anthology is now out in the world! Celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the brilliant project ’52 / 250 -A Year of Flash,’ 52 writers (including yours truly), respond to their previous work with new creations.
Congratulations and many thanks to Michelle Elvy, John Wentworth Chapin, and all contributors!
The link at the publisher’s site is here: https://pureslush.com/…/anthologie…/a-cluster-of-lights/
• paperback – https://bit.ly/PB-CLUSTER
• ePub – https://bit.ly/ePubCluster
• Kindle – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C56JGVJ9/
For a ‘taste of a Cluster of Lights’, click below:
FROM THE BOOK OF LIFE
A time will come in your life when you too will feel like a prisoner. It may be love keeping you boxed in or hate sucking out the air around you. It may be illness clipping your wings, or simply the weight of years … no matter.
Bach cantatas... unpicking stitches from the kneeler
The Luitpold Bridge in Munich is closed. Climate activists have glued themselves to the road disrupting traffic. They are not afraid of a jail sentence, they say. Part of me yearns to be there with them. Making statements, taking action. Instead, I follow signs for an alternative route, like so many ahead of me, and so many behind. Our long, slow-moving queue snakes around our principles.
on the radio…
instructions for instant
gratification
In The Other Bunny 27 Feb 2023
The three micro-haibun from the series-in-progress The Censored Poems
The very antithesis of cherry blossom. On the one hand and on the other. And in between
breathing the torpid air of the mausoleum morels, porcini, chanterelles
*
Play if you must. Laugh till you cry. But life is serious. The road is hard, paved with hunger, illness, war. Greed and envy. They will haunt you. Pick apples if you must. Oranges, figs. It won’t make any difference.
Hosannah! at the nudist beach my sunglasses
*
Now that that illness accosted me and I stood up to it, I feel entitled to a few wisdoms.
minding the gap the chilling beauty of angels
Happy New Year 2023! And happy news! Issue 16 of MacQueen’s Quinterly is out!
Filled with excellent work by fellow poets, it makes for a great read! I am particularly chuffed to have 3 of my micro-haibun included from “Censored Poems,” a series in progress. My heartfelt thanks to Clare MacQueen for giving them a home.
*
before Zoom meet— I pluck my chin hair
A big thank you to the Editors Alan Summers & Pippa Philips for featuring my senryu.
Congratulations to all featured poets.
Pleased to see Robert Epstein’s anthology is out! “The Haiku Way to Healing: Illness, Injury and Pain” is a significant contribution to haiku literature, a testament to the power of this very short form of poetry to express and share even the most painful of moments.
Honored that my work is included in this collection.
Here is one of my poems from page 207, initially part of a haibun published in “Contemporary Haibun Online” 17.1, and recently included in my juxtaEIGHT article ‘Parkinson’s Toolbox: The Case for Haiku’ (pp.37-61)
dyskinesia… how tall grass sways
Parkinson’s the slowly advancing desert . HSA Members’ Anthology 2021
My haiku in Charlotte Digregorio’s Daily Haiku blog. Many thanks to the editor for re-printing the poem (Modern Haiku, 45:2, 2014).
Sixty years ago, she swallowed her grandmother’s most valuable possession: a ring, the only object to have survived the forced expulsion from their ancestral lands. The very ring that her grandmother, every night before bed, kissed and raised to the sky as if God needed the daily reminder that he had let her down.
Since that day of the half-accidental ingestion, and for two years afterward, the child was forced to use a potty, so that her grandmother could search its contents for the ring. To no avail.
In the summer of 2021, however, the ring exited the girl—now a grandmother herself—as if of its own volition. Effortlessly. The symbol of her family’s pain that her muscles had smothered, had been released. She heard the sound and to her astonishment, saw the ring lying at the bottom of the toilet bowl. Feeling nauseous, and while trying to steady herself, she accidentally pulled the chain that flushed away her long-held secret. She caught a glimpse of the ring before it disappeared in the swirling water to join the big, open sea.
letting go—
hunger for Scheherazade’s
stories
*
In Drifting Sands Haibun, issue 14, March 2022
Pleased to see that my “duvet” found a home in Blithe Spirit, vol 32, no 1!
Haibuphoria!
“For What We are About to Receive” my haibun on Drifting Sands— A journal of Haibun and Tanka Prose, Issue 13 (edited by Adelaide B. Shaw) is now online in both Web and PDF versions. https://drifting-sands-haibun.org/…/for-what-we-are…
The whole issue of wonderful haibun is available here:Web: https://drifting-sands-haibun.org/ Enjoy!
Many thanks to Charlotte Digregorio for featuring my haiku on her Daily Haiku blog!
another winter
the space between longing
and longing
in Tinywords, 31 May 2021. Issue 21.1
Happy to see 2 of my stories from Feeding the Doves (Dream Island and Written) included (pp. 61-62) in issue 6 of the Romanian Journal Revista Kibo Titan! Grateful thanks to Clelia Ifrim and Dani Dumitrache!
Collateral Damage
After four or five years, the miracle pill—the “gold standard” of Parkinson’s treatment—loses its sparkle. The drug wears off several times a day, allowing symptoms to reappear or worsen. Unless you increase the dosage, you’ll be staring into the abyss: muscle stiffness, imbalance, weakness, lethargy… And if you increase it?
dyskinesia. . .
how tall grass
sways
In Contemporary Haibun Online 17.1
My heartfelt thanks to editor Clare MacQueen for publishing this haibun
in issue 7 of MacQueen’s Quinterly. It had originally appeared in the
Wales Haiku Journal.
It’s at its loudest in the early morning hours. Before light dissolves darkness, before the neighbour leaves for work, before the birds start singing, his laboured breathing comes over the baby monitor whispering, gurgling, rattling, spluttering….
I lie awake listening to the crack of thunder, the roaring waterfall, the sounds of the sea emitted from his chest. A car starting, the exhaust backfiring, the train leaving station. The boat reversing in the harbour. Light rain. A soft meow. His breathing renders a whole world. In this soundscape, I make out the stories he told me when years ago he put me to bed.
Soon, light dispels the apparitions, and his breath comes over the monitor soft, steady, regular, lulling me to sleep.
music of the spheres
how we became
human
Stella Pierides 