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Haiku

September 2012

#044

On The Cusp Of Change

Haiku's have been fun
to say goodbye to summer
and welcome autumn!

Jan Hedger
GROW

Ramshaw Rocks

From the twisting road
Ramshaw Rocks are a profile
Shaped by the coarse wind

Louise Glasscoe

Life Blood

Life blood of the town,
Buxton water wells up through
its living earth veins.

Louise Glasscoe

Leaf

Leaf in the water
floating, quietly, motionlessly
sign of the autumn

Marie Neumann
Pow!

Mosquito

Like a buzzing saw
I thirst, to feed on balmy
evenings; femme fatale

Jan Hedger
GROW

The Long Count

Yeah sure! Of course
There are butterflies & lilies
Soliloquies & sunsets
That is if
You know where to look
Though many stopped looking
Long ago

They turned their backs
On beauty
And the power held through murder
And the tyrants
To focus on
Figureheads & celebrities
And other distractions
Like the false religions of death

Our universe
One of many
So very far from the centre
A speck and backwater
On the limp wrist
Of a spiral arm

But pay no heed;
Inoculate, inject
Lest we infect
Ourselves with truth

We wait for the plague
But it is already here
It lives in the beer
Waits at the lights
Sleeps alone at nights
Lives in the hearts of the lonely

It’s passed in the water
Drank when alone
Waits by the phone
In the old folks home
The lonely hearts column
And social isolation
Perfected in the e-mail and text

Hand held devices keep us apart
And we dwell within concrete and steel
The beams holding the roof
Doric columns
Like those of the Parthenon

A gateway
To the temple of the lonely

The long count
Of earthly lives
Begun twenty-six thousand years ago

Andrew Henry Smith
Stevenage Survivors

Contortion-A Distorted Haiku

Epigrammatically I try to contort my inner life
Into seventeen syllables
A group of miracles
I can't believe in

Waves and snow cover
A tiger speckled
Mountain where
The wind is in my hair
Blowing my mind
Like it was blown and
Contorted
In nineteen seventy
Seventeen times or more

I wanted to say so much
In terms so beautiful
You could not fail to reward me
With gold and praise
An award dinner at least
A book token

I wanted to influence you
To alter the course of your lives and
Save the very world from falling
From the precipice
And save all the animals dying in
The shrinking forests
And curdling seas of puss

Tyrants and turds
Stride the earth
Standing on the shoulders of dwarves
Curdled and contorted so I hope soon that
Plugholes they will drain into like us all
With us scum clinging to the sides
Kicking them as they go
A go-go
Oh yeah baby
oO-oO-oO
Until fade out
And contortioooooooooooooooo

Andrew Henry Smith
Stevenage Survivors

For Frank

Three seasons he was
Spring, Summer, Autumn; but nay
as bleak as Winter.

Jan Hedger
GROW

Bandit

big wide frightened eyes
I have a cat called bandit
poor scared little boy

Liz Jury
GROW

Low-Coup For Trayvon Martin

Emmett Till is killed
Again as arch-deceivers
Say murder does pay

© Ángel L. Martínez

Guaguancó 1 & 2

"Queremos"

Queremos un mundo sin la tormenta
Un amor más hermosa
Ala de paz

We want a world without rainstorms
As love is so beautiful
In the wings of peace

"Almas"

En mi alma
Los ojos a la tierra
Te llama
Un amor de mis ojos
Que cantan la rumba buena
Ojo de mi vida

My soul on the eyes of this land
I call you the love of my dreams
I sing to you a good rumba
Eyes of my life

© Carlos Raul Dufflar 5/20/92
The Bread is Rising Poetry Collective

Herring Gull

Grey wings sprouting forth
White bodily form sustained
Cascading freedom*

Footnote: Relates to the gushing waves of the sea, which is blue; a colour symbolising freedom.

Mark Crittenden
GROW

JOY

Jumping gleefully
Over the moon, through the stars
Yearning to be seen

Mark Crittenden
GROW

Marbled Butterfly

Fragment of cloth, caught
mine eye, fluttering it flew
a scrap of beauty

Jan Hedger
GROW

Mother

She's an early bird
Who always catches a worm
To feed her young