March 2009
40 posts
Lines for February 19
Stone to sand – the sleeping
wisdom of water. An
afternoon of love,
the surprise of it, as
the stones had been surprised.
- Tom Montag of The Middlewesterner
February 2009
72 posts
Third eye — The day-lit half-white moon.
Ken Wagner
Rabbit: I tend my fire in the sun. Snake: I am the sun.
Slow Reads
two birds fly across
a dark cloud, a golden cloud
in pale sky
LINES FOR FEBRUARY 25
The poet, like a man
collecting stones.
The weight soon enough
brings us to standing still.
Tom Montag on The Middlewesterner
From the topmost spike of the dead black cherry, the cardinal announces himself king red of a gray world.
bluegrasspoet
How to use darkness?
You may sleep or if awake
Look up at the stars
Twitterku
Constellations above and below: flecks of frost glint on the black plastic grill cover.
Oversouled
i. One shrouded star a wide contrail the last child playing ii. Who the owl cries, but I cannot tell J.S. Absher
crossing a street from gutter to gutter
this, here, now
Adriaan
From "Haiku for a Day in January"
Winter palimpsest: inside each white-tailed deer track, a coyote print.
Dave Bonta
And check out the rest!
1 tag
A Twitter-hater’s rant:
The most maddening defense of Twitter is that it constitutes some form of art. Boosters like to claim that compressing communication into 140 characters results in a kind of computer-age poetry. “[Twitter users are] trying to describe their activities in a way that is interesting to others: the status update as a literary form,” writes Thompson in his...
Is salt an appetite :: or the sea’s insistence
Grant Hackett (Falling Off the Mountain)
manifest toe
From blueheron:
Other micropoets (perhaps even nanopoets operating at the atomic level) may call their tweets whatever they please.
Dogs & Cats
Earflap, yawn then bow:
Dog’s formal morning greeting
Ancient Shinto priest
You’re mudpuddle wet
Digging gofers from burrows
Species: canidae
One plaintive “Meow”
Beside the bed this morning:
Old cat wants breakfast
My cat’s ancestor Felis silvestris lybica,
Would be proud of him
All night long I dreamt
The stars were haunted by owls:
Soft hoots, silver light.
Twitterku
Bright windy day I catch my silk scarf before it flies Kris Lindbeck
Sorta Tankas (Tanka Toys?)
Freshly composed on Identi.ca:
Silhouettes coppered by the morning sun, three geese descend; Martian war machines emitting death ray honks.
In response to this dent by exador23:
Word entanglement; quantum phonemes squatting in the left temporal lobe. Spooky hobos muttering sweet nothings at a distance.
From "25 Random Things About Me"
When words fail me, I have them fed to the geese.
The internet changed my life! I forget the details.
My favorite color is not in the visible spectrum. It’s shy.
When I was your age, I was grateful just to be unemployed.
Everything I need to know I learned from studying prestressed concrete.
Dave Bonta on via negativa
Lines for February 9
The hanging sky. The grey day. Wisdom is of no use against the snow.
The Middlewesterner
Longing for Dangriga
(i)
morning after rain
the brown river cannot hold
the black sky
(ii)
heat shimmers
boys in the shade
spitting seeds
(iii)
houses on stilts
bowlegged grannies shambling
down the allies
(iv)
heat shimmers
in the shade of a pink house
two white horses
(v)
heat shimmers
the Maya Mountains
blue with rain
(vi)
the horses canter past
potholes shake and shimmy
with muddy sky
(vii)
even in...
night covers all
Spinoza blends with the quiet rain
Adriaan
13 loons fishing
Amidst whitecaps & seagulls -
Loons dive, seagulls swirl.
Twiterku
Three sharp shotgun blasts
Just far enough to echo -
Raucous crows protest
Twitterku
bare tree tops
gulls circling through the rain
Adriaan
1 tag
In some other world
the broken heart on my chest
shows a gaping hole:
thru my ribs watch hair blowing,
see the abandoned loveseat.
…
by PF Anderson (another link in the VD chain)
1 tag
the red-bud saving its heart-shaped leaves till March JS Absher (another poem in the series)
1 tag
burning pain and tears overwhelm the endorphines: chilli chocolate heart
loopy (another link in the VD chain)
1 tag
Snow wet against my forehead— Valentine’s Day walk.
morningporch (another link)
1 tag
chirrup of mobile from an African mountain short valentine service
loopy (next link in the chain)
1 tag
Heavy white cardstock: valentine from a reader of my online verse.
morningporch (the next link in the chain)
1 tag
the morning post brings lone parent welfare factsheet sealed, without a kiss
loopy (in response to JS Absher)
Spikes of sunlight poke through a brief unzipping of the low grey cloud, light without heat, all talk and no action.
loopy
first hard frost
the scalded hog
hangs by its feet
JS Absher
from Twitter
Today I am too thick with myself to notice anything.
Fiona Robyn - a small stone
Driving home
A snow hill looms from the mist, the horizon missing. Someone’s scissors have cut out cattle shapes.
Fiona Robyn - a small stone
Spring day in Winter
Wasps beat against the window,
Quick black flames of hope
Twitterku
1 tag
Forms in English Haiku, by Keiko Imaoka →
I posted the above link in response to an Identica user who questioned haiku that doesn’t adhere to a strict 5-7-5 syllable count. If you write haiku in English or other European languages, what guides your choice of form?
Where daffodils bloomed in April, goldenrod sways — a more worldly yellow. The distant hurricane makes a roosting Monarch flap its wings.
Morning Porch
Our nap much too long,
Old black tomcat licked my nose
Roughly with fish breath.
Twitterku
empty sky
Is an empty sky the work I haven’t begun
Falling off the mountain (posted with permission)
Dirt falls from her hand, from her cloudy face. Leaning back on an awning pole, a funeral guy wrings a fag against his sole.
SlowReads
Silhouetted against the snow, not one but two rabbits! Winter says: where much is hidden, much is also revealed. Ask the great-horned owls.
morningporch
North for Christmas
Half gray, half golden
a flock of little clouds
scattered below me
Snow-swept dawn
Wind shouts around the house
Trees lift their arms and dance
What abides with us
this quiet morning?
In silence, God’s son.
Snow reveals
that a fox has walked the path
we made in summer.
Snow-tipped pines
dimly reflected
in the wet black road
Dawn ascent: gray plains
...
On my neighbor’s dock,
Vulture Guild bleakly perches:
Not much died today.
Twitterku
who also loves buzzards.
Crow bored with caw caw
Fills his feathered chest with wind
Sings yodel lay hee
- Another crow verse from Twitterku
Everything: two from Ben Zen
Everywhere is nowhere, Says Ben, Everything is now here. * O, to be the junkman, Ben says. To have everything no one wants.
from The Big Book of Ben Zen, by Tom Montag
the glowing ends
of cigarettes rise and fall
summer night
JS Absher on Twitter
1 tag
Hot green chutney: mint, cilantro, lime. If only I could write like that!
Kris Lindbeck
1 tag
Crow: neck bowed over,
Wingtips hunched, claws extended,
Drops onto the branch.
Twitterku