ant gallery
I may well have just ruined a nuanced and delicate haiku that took me days to write with an obvious visual joke, but I’m not sorry. Designing the badge (an option on Snapseed I’d never previously had a use for) led to a completely new understanding of “recognition.”
These are old carpenter ant galleries exposed on a standing dead tree as the cambium rots off.
mud dauber nests
Just spotted this at the back of the garage when I put away the car this afternoon. How had I missed it before? Such gorgeous architecture. I’m not entirely sure what I had in mind with the words but they felt right, and sometimes that’s enough.
rodent teeth find
something to gnaw
Ordinarily I’d have gone with “finding” but changed it to fit the newspaper headline and sub-heading style. That came toward the end of two days (appropriately enough) of fiddling around with various textual and font possibilities. Out-takes included “two-day snowstorm my solitude growing voluptuous” and “two-day snowstorm the sudden snap of a mousetrap”.
The fonts are Perpetua Titling MT Bold and Gauge Oblique (which to my eye is indistinguishable from Gauge Italic, but what do I know).
for hours the sky
unlined
I’m starting to measure my walks in haiku. Today’s had seven! Here’s one of them.
a crow hunter’s
crow call
With the change in the calendar comes a major change in photohaiku presentation here. After years of resisting the urge to make haiga (or postal poems, as a short-lived journal I used to edit called photos incorporating text), I’ve finally given in, prompted by the discovery that the Snapseed app, which I’ve had on my phone for years, makes it really easy. (In my defense, the text option is hidden near the bottom of the tools menu.) I’ve long been bothered by the unimaginative text-image pairings and poor font choices in a lot of online photo haiga, so this is my chance to try and do a little better (while still failing frequently, I’m sure).
I’ll still split the text between title and post, for accessibility’s sake and to maintain consistency with the archive. I may still post photos without text in them. And I’ll continue to cross-post to Instagram (@neotoma_magister) and auto-post to Twitter (@morningporch), so you can follow me there as well if you’re a masochist.
to track up my snow
mourning dove wings
the perfect fit of foot
to footprint
the pond’s ice creaks
under her weight
lying at right angles
my camera is a phone
