that we might go back to: frog pond, mating ball of snakes, coyote song, hummingbird battle, voice out of the whirlwind, tectonic rhythms of the planet… everything is primal or nothing is, given the cosmos’s mania for recycling.
Some thoughts toward a rite of spring. Obviously not a haiga, but I had a photo and a mind fart that seemed to go with it, so up it went on Instagram + Facebook. Then I remembered there’s an Epigrams and Conundrums category here.
a small bird’s shadow
crossing the snow
Haiku and snapshot both collected on this afternoon’s walk, though I didn’t link the two till I got back. I wanted a cursive font, so I edited it in GIMP on the laptop until I found one that worked. I actually preferred a different font, Rose of Baltimore, which seemed to have a more haiku feel, but the lower-case O’s looked too much like A’s, so for readability’s sake I went with a font called Work in Progress instead, with a kerning of -3. The one thing I neglected to do was to gray it out a bit, so the text ends up being a bit more dominant than I’d like. But since I’m a blogger and not a perfectionist, I’m not going to re-do it now. Lunch is calling.
the easy chair’s
mountain
A few evenings ago, I was sitting on the folded-up futon reading when I looked over and noticed the chair in the corner piled high with trail maps, also looking very settled in and cozy. After a few overly verbose attempts I settled on the wording here. The next day I took a snapshot that sort of worked, but I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic — probably because I’d left the house with the intention of finding an image to accompany the haiku. This direct approach rarely works for me in videopoetry either. Then yesterday, just capturing images that spoke to me on their own, I came up with what would, I realized this morning, make a much better haiga.
I just love the long shadows this time of year. (Those are gray squirrel tracks, by the way.)
all the wild birds are scolding
something in the hedge
the snow shares a shadow
with the wall
trees drag the rippled snow
with their nets
digging through
the blue shadows
in search of food
the paint may be chipping
but what fine shadows
move silently
where horses once paced
skinny shadows lead
to thorny trunks
