letting my shadow
lead the way
Had a great walk in Gallitzin State Forest’s Clear Shade Wild Area yesterday, and got better photos than this, but who can resist a name like Ogle Township?
Ogle Township
Category: landscape
up and down
these ancient mountains
my wobbly knees
A senryu, so the obviousness of the image is fine, I think.
driving home from the hospital
the boundless sky
Appalachian spring
the pale green sugar
maples’ sun
A view of the aforementioned Tyrone water gap (and the town of Tyrone beyond) from the end of our mountain.
climbing the mountain
a new cloud
almost in bloom
Climbing the side of the mountain toward sunset yesterday, I made it up the steep part to be greeted by the first blossoming (or almost blossoming) shadbush, that iconic Appalachian denizen of the understory with the proliferation of names: shadblow, serviceberry, sarvis, etc. Is the photo over-processed? Perhaps, but in my defense I’m simply trying to reproduce what I most appreciate about blossoming shadbush aesthetically, the way it contrasts with the otherwise still mostly bare, unadorned woods.
behind the swamp
with its skunk cabbages
an empty airport
Photo taken at the edge of an infrequently used, remote airstrip which my hiking buddy kept saying reminded her of Breaking Bad. I made a version of this with and without drop-shadow, and it took me a while to decide which I preferred. The font is something called Splash, and I like how it seems both swampy and airporty.
pruning season
the angel of history’s
prosthetic wings
When there’s too much to fit into a haiku — the giant pylons, each tree’s signature of knots, the scream of a red-tailed hawk circling low overhead — my instinct is to reach for some unifying symbol. The Biden administration’s apparent decision to double down on our forever wars has been preying on my mind.
Made in Snapseed with a font that’s only supposed to be used for single lines of text, but since it looks so handwritten, it’s not imperative to get each line exactly the same height, so saving one line at a time more or less works.
fallow
mountaintop field
feeding clouds
Kind of the same idea as this haiku, but not as cerebral and with a possible emotional connection to the opening word. The photo was taken at the next old farm to the southwest, two+ miles down the ridge.
daybreak
in January
only crows crow
Back with the crows again. I have noticed though that nearly every morning, crows seem to wake up almost exactly at sunrise, even when it’s cloudy.
Initially I had “January daybreak only the crows crow” but that put the semantic break too close to the center, and I do prefer the asymmetry of classic haiku. I might be overthinking it, though.
mountain
without peaks
keep going
