From one of my favorite haiku scribes…happy #fullmoonsocial Ron!
HAIKU SEXTET– 03042015 — fullmoonsocial
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Author Archives: Jeff Schwaner
#FullMoonSocial // Overcast Full Moon Night, After Snow
Overcast Full Moon Night, After Snow
Rain melts snow then turns
to snow: earth slides soft
then stiffens and stills
and disappears under new snow:
Clouds ride endless wind
always leaving: unseen
and unmoved by the mess
and distance, something
of you and I makes its
own slow circle above
serpent on his shoulder swims swimmingly
More full moon verse…thanks Errin!
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four feminine ducks
walking down the water’s plank
beginning ballet
mallard men passing
one behind the other
the line flows to the left
girls dancing far right
they must know what a line is
someone has cooties
females turn around
flowing next to manly men
forming two straight lines
someone’s husband
taking pictures of other ducks
not this cute ballet
foggy and hazy
eighty one yesterday
only seventy four
at eighty one
the pool was chilly but now
fearless man has jumped in
october warmth
sixty seven a few hours ago
no screaming
everyone is born
with the same pool conversation
inside their mind
a man jumps in
the answer is i’m very cold
asks you how you are
he says it will warm up
his son laughs and tells him
he is mistaken
that he saw her in
the pool ten minutes ago
“she would be warm now”
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Three Cinquains under the Moon (for Adelaide Crapsey)
Adelaide is with us again tonight, Robert.
This is my offering for Jeff Schwaner’s “Full Moon Social” celebration.
October 8, 1914
Listen…
three silences
none harsher than your breath
dissipating into the night’s
bright mouth.
Later
Rainfall
and wind. How I
would like to have touched you
if only with words trembling from
my lips.
October 8, 2014
A moon
that we might share
from mountain to the sea
a gift belonging to no one
but you.
Adelaide Crapsey’s last full moon lit the skies on October 4, 1914. She died four days later, at age 36. A poet well ahead of her time, she created the American cinquain, a five-line form of 22 syllables which I have followed in these three poems.
I discovered only after-the-fact that the Full Moon Social Jeff Schwaner hosted on October 8, 2014 fell on the 100th anniversary of Adelaide’s death. These poems were written with that particular evening still looming…
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Full Moon Social – Upon Waking, I Remember
Getting the Full Moon Social going multi-media style…
Conditions Being What They Are
Conditions Being What They Are
Warm March morning. The sky dropped a foot
of snow on us a week ago and now it rises
in the warm air as fog in the hollows and foothills
disappear as I drive through it. Tonight it’s coming
back down as rain which will be snow before it ends
and I’ll be bending my back to shovel it away
from my car. Three times I will have passed through
it in a week, this same stuff, reconfigured, recycled.
When they buried my uncle a few days ago I knew
if there is a soul it’s like this snow, form a phase only
with respect to specific conditions and maybe
for all that, still surviving, no memory, none,
recognition only a scent like snow before it snows.
After the Black Crow Comes to Take Me Away, I Compose These Lines
Artwork by Mary Winifred Hood Schwaner
Note: This poem is not a translation but was created by free-associating with the traditional Chinese characters found one of Mei Yao-ch'en's last poems, written over 960 years ago. What's below is more a round of poetic archaeology--like digging up the characters that made up the poem but not knowing how they fit together, and piecing together something entirely different from them. I hope to actually translate this poem properly one day soon, but thought I would share this curious first stage of the work with you. ----JS
After The Black Spirit Comes to Take Me Away, I Compose These Lines
Dark winged spirit, in the olden days even I had compassion for you! I’d tell folks
who’d just as soon spit on you and curse you if fate came their way on your wings
that Oh! the hour could not contain you, you’d overturn your own nest to shoot out
like sound from a plucked string, even to banishment from your old landlord, time.
Well, the history books are wrong! And here you are, stranded as well, so do not be so quick to reproach these days, too, which the master apprehends, like a bullet flicked across the mind,
a thought just passing, now detached. Sure, you can eat till you’re plump in Taicang,
buy a new nest in Kaoshu township, daybreak’s rooster’s not crying for you,
hundreds of birds will argue who can admire it best
but you cannot approach that phoenix, that emperor, or peep down into its celestial fire.
At this moment, to no avail across the warp of the sky your spirit flies north and south—
Its shadow falls on the cunning rabbit but cannot peck its eyes, or separate the thief from his base.
It’s more complex now that I’m dead, detesting the person with noble aspirations is not the same as becoming fond of this tiny bird that’s come around. I know I’m not either kind,
contrary to who I am, as if I flourished in the Qin or Han dynasties, brave and chivalrous!
Want some advice? Distance yourself from your reputation, Crow. I’ll just carry on on foot. I’ve got
something final to look after.
#fullmoonsocial, anyone? Thursday March 5, 2015
Last full moon of winter will find us later this week. Anyone up for another communal poetry writing and sharing party on this upcoming full moon? If you are, just use the tag “fullmoonsocial” on your WordPress blog post or #fullmoonsocial if you’re tweeting your poem.
I’ve got the moon hitting full at 1:05 pm EST. At that point, until it sets wherever you happen to be, consider the party to be started. I’ll be following the tags and posting links to your poems as I see them. As with our inaugural full moon social, if you’re interested in having your poem (or photo or artwork, whatever you post!) included in a free epub anthology that I’ll put together shortly after the party, let me know in an email to jeffrey.schwaner@gmail.com. If you’re contributing, all rights are retained by you. The moon doesn’t take your rights.
Another Reason Why I Wish the House Next Door Had Not Sold, Though It Is Still Abandoned
Another Reason Why I Wish the House Next Door Had Not Sold, Though It Is Still Abandoned
Out my second story window I would see great branches
flowing from an unseen maple’s trunk, striding on the air
to the roof of the house next door.
A month ago two men climbed the tree
to the roof. I watched them slowly saw, saw away
anything they could reach. The new view’s an old metal roof
snow sliding down its creases, winter’s white sky
and a single wren on the tip of tender branch up
where saws could not reach. I used to see squirrels,
a dozen in an hour, traveling branches like highways;
now while I don’t see anything I still hear them
in the gutter over my own window. But I keep looking
where they used to be: the deepest view an empty one
The Morning After the Ice Storm On the Day After the Snow Storm
My children walk on the foot-high snow leaving no prints
I remember doing that the feeling of not falling through
of being lighter than snow I remember the days I was sure
I would never leave any prints that I could walk
on the surface of the world and leave no trace
then are the days where you feel you are nothing but prints
Nothing but traces and paths and trails and then the days
you wake up to another death and your son
is reading how it took two hundred million years
for trees to develop leaves and
then you are back to leaving no prints
Translations from the English 