April clouds drift to a soundtrack of traffic. It could be anywhere, but it isn’t just anywhere, it’s the eastern part of western Pennsyltucky.
Dutchman’s breeches
trembling in the breeze
of passing trucks
The font used here, as for a number of these haiga lately, is called Gloss and Bloom, which seems appropriate.
Road cuts end up serving as wildflower refugia in many places for two simple reasons: they’re often moist with seeps, and white-tailed deer don’t hang out there.
Some stumps of felled hemlocks may be kept on life support for decades by adjacent relatives, with their interconnected roots serving as feeding tubes. Other species might send up new sprouts, but that’s not within the hemlock’s skill set. You can recognize living stumps by the scar tissue that continues to grow over the cut, adding new growth rings, trying somehow to recover.
unfinished
with its commitments
living stump
the spring sun now
only a taste
Thanks to my hiking buddy L. for spotting this and another living stump nearby on a walk near Huntingdon, PA yesterday. In her honor I used a font called Slyfaen (it’s an inside joke). I couldn’t compress everything I wanted into a haiku, so it became a tanka. So this isn’t properly a haiga (or, with the prose, a haibun) but something similar.
My latest video haibun. For text and notes (and to browse others in the series), please visit Via Negativa.
I’ve posted a few haiku videos here before, as it occurred to me. I’ll try to make a habit of it from now on. They’re very much of a piece with my still-photo haiga. No less than Jim Kacian, the guy behind Red Moon Press and The Haiku Foundation as well as a brilliant haijin in his own right, prefers to call haiku films video haiga.
