my devotion to you
going bloom
What does it mean? I’m not quite sure. It came to me as part of a haibun free-write on a walk this afternoon. Then I saw these dogwood blossoms.
The font here is called Calvin.
dog-like
tiger beetle in the road
teach me your kung fu
There’s an acute lack of resolution in this photo due to cropping from a too-distant shot. The beetle was actually quite cooperative, and allowed me to approach to the point where I was holding the phone just inches away, but that’s when the camera chose to stop focusing and require a re-start, by which time the beetle had buggered off. So this isn’t going to win any awards. On the other hand, I’m rather pleased with the haiku.
budburst time
even the empty bench
is turning green
This font is called Parry Hotter. Never one to resist a terrible pun, I gave it a try and whaddayaknow, it’s not half bad.
finding where the night goes
cave water
small seeds
the prayer-like feeling
of patting dirt
I don’t usually deploy ellipses in haiku but in the first line here it has a kind of concrete-poetry effect, I think.
Extensive fiddling with the wording to keep from sounding too precious; not sure I succeeded. The decision to go with “dirt” rather than “soil” was pragmatic, though: I didn’t want too-hasty viewers to read it as “potting soil.”
whitening sky
seed potatoes cut down
to one eye each
One of those goofy fonts I’ll probably never use again, but seems to work here, for some reason. It’s called Flubber.
one snow
the forest is fully awake for
doomed blooms
I didn’t go out of my way to shoot photos of yesterday’s snow because I felt like I’d done that to death on previous Aprils, and there was nothing new to see. But then of course I got this haiku and only had a couple of snapshots I’d taken from my porch. That’ll teach me!
Earth Day
millipede on the green
bathroom wall
waves passing through
its carpet of feet
Good to find a use once again for the target-shaped text option in Snapseed. The auto-generated font sizes and lines were a good fit for this tanka as well, I think. All in all, I’d say my smugness about this haiga-like thing is appropriate for the day, which has long been mainly an exercise in corporate greenwashing and liberal performative virtue.
sun-drenched spring woods
finding a dead leaf
to wipe my brow
Old leaves skeletonized by leaf miners are just endlessly photogenic.
fiddleheads
every hour less spring,
more escape
A bit of mechanical clock imagery. Couldn’t resist yet another pun on “spring.” But hopefully my deeper fascination with the fern’s self-revelation-as-reinvention comes through as well.
