April 2021 (Renewal)

the seed waits, dreaming–
colors pulse in liquid sound
spirit overflows

This is a reprisal of my April 2015 grid with a new poem for Colleen’s #TankaTuesday, haiku/senryu. The collage and original haiku were inspired by Monet’s waterlilies.

I’m going to continue my monthly grid and draw-a-bird day here, while I will be posting for NaPoWriMo on kblog.

water lilies: green
creeping, imperceptible,
suddenly present

Green Jay (Draw a Bird Day)

clever, curious–
your flashy loud mimicry
a family trait

Continuing my explorations of the Corvid family, I decided to collage and draw a green jay this month. Residents of the Texas borderlands, they are also found in Central and South America. Like all corvids, they are intelligent, adaptable, brash, and have a large variety of vocalizations, including imitating the calls of hawks to drive away food competitors. They also use sticks as tools to pry bark up to get to the insects underneath.

Green jays live and forage communally, in family groups. The populations are currently stable, although habitat destruction is a concern, particularly in Mexico, and around the proposed border wall to be built through the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge.

March 2021

what dream is this?  circling
spiralling into form
slipstreamed fertile reborn
continuous

Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday theme is dreams, so I’ve written a variety of dream poems for March, a dreamy month I think. I’ve interspersed some of my previous March grids.

in March I
ruminate return
remember
rains that be
come sun-dappled spring—shining,
blooming with birdwings

dreams become
part of the landscape
filling in

colors
begin to dance
with waves of light, singing
sun into roots, filling
my nights with dreams
of dawn

Poetic forms are, in order, abhanga, shadorma, haiku, badger’s hexastitch.

Year of the Metal Ox

holding pattern—keep
at it, follow through, rebuild,
preserve—demand truth

Happy Chinese New Year!

You can see previous Chinese New Year posts (I missed last year as I was moving) here, here, here, here, and here.

February 2021

are the days
moving on, circling
back, slipping
through?  or are
they giving up, slowing down,
following the un

seen astride
the invisible
vibrations
of tidings reaching for shore
lines that aren’t there–echos of
places remembered,

emerging
from folds of pages–
not maps, but
renderings
sparkling against the stardust
of reflected nights–

between here
there and then not now
conclusions
masquerade
as omens—uncaught, eddied
by prevailing winds

For my February grid, another mandala. We are still mired in confusing times. Too many trees, not enough forest.

Sometimes a change of perspective can clarify, or at least calm the stormy seas.

Poem up at the Ekphrastic Review

My poem Upon a Time, inspired by “Spinning Flax”, by Maria Martinetti, below, is posted on The Ekphrastic Review today.

hushabye, don’t cry–
all the pretty horses fly
shining starborne dreams

You can read the entire poem here.

My thanks once again to editor Lorette C. Luzajic for supporting my work and the interaction between the visual and written arts.

forms in nature

be always
impossible be
enchanted
reaching out
in reciprocity to
meet the world halfway

The Kick-About challenge this week uses Ernst Haeckel’s “Art Forms in Nature” as inspiration. If you’ve never seen these images, take a look here. Below is the sample provided with the challenge, but I decided to use different images as inspiration for my composite creatures.

I looked in my collage box/reference book collection for nature images that I could combine to create new forms based on Haeckel’s paintings.

This is a project that could go on and on…

Conception (Reprise)

1
imagine
growing roots into
fertile ground

fertile ground
the protective cloak
of the earth

of the earth
talking to the moon
with stillness

with stillness
welcome the new year
imagine

2
always, earth
transitioning—life
rearranged
into new
patterns—open your arms wide–
inhale, welcoming

For Frank Tassone’s #haikai challenge for the New Year, and Colleen’s #tanka Tuesday challenge to write a poem of hope, I’ve written two variations of the same idea, and reprised a collage I did for an earlier #tanka Tuesday in 2019.

Colleen asked us to use our favorite form of poetry and to tell why we like it. Of course I love pantoums and all repetitive poetry, and I often write using Japanese poetic forms, but I most often write in shadorma. Somehow its rhythm and length work well with the way I express my thoughts, and when I’m stuck, it works to focus me, making me consider the exact words I’m using and why.

I used the haiku form of the first poem, with the repeating lines, in a post on kblog, but couldn’t remember where I had seen it. I’ve since discovered it is called Shi Rensa, and it was invented by Ronovan, who has his own haiku and decima challenges at RonovanWrites.

reflections

ancestors speak in voices
carried by skies singing wings

Colleen’s #TankaTuesday prompt was the watercolor, above. She also challenged us to write a wakiku–two seven-syllable lines that some how connect with the hokku she wrote to accompany the painting. You can read Colleen’s poem here.

Draw a Bird Day: Cedar Waxwing

give and take–
belonging nurtures
from both sides

Cedar waxwings are social birds, known to gather in large flocks for eating, where they can often be seen feeding each other. Their food sources include cedar cones, fruit, and insects, and they migrate in groups when all the local fruit, their favorite meal, has been consumed. They are also attracted to the sound of running water, and can be found bathing in both creeks and fountains.

A group of waxwings is called a “museum” or an “earful”–they can be quite loud.

I also posted about the cedar waxwing a year ago–a good December bird I think.