They Gave Us Life

 This new anthology, 
They Gave Us Life: Celebrating Mothers, 
Fathers & Others in Haiku, 
edited by Robert Epstein, 
includes five of my tanka:

a priest told her

no Jews allowed in heaven–

she raised me

under a white oak

and named it Paradise

    ~  Atlas Poetica 18, 2014

my mother’s voice

reciting The Highwayman

by moonlight

the gleam of a dark red love knot

the clatter of galloping years

    ~  Moonlight on Water, 2016

decades 

of advent calendars

my mother sent,

each marked with its year . . .

so many doors left open

    ~  A Hundred Gourds 4:2, 2015

long-ago

adventure rides

with my father . . . 

those sunlit roads

I thought could never end

    ~  Moonlight on Water, 2016

echoing 

across the river

the tune

my father used to whistle

on summer mornings

    ~  red lights 11:2, 2015

gone

the scream

of a red-tailed hawk

over the wood

where dozers wait—

my silent cry an echo

the giraffe

earns a place

on the Red List—

Gaia’s ghost

haunts my dreams

stacking stones

to build a cairn . . .

balancing

Earth’s bones,

I awaken to vertigo

fifty years

from discovery

to extinction—

a Pagan reed-warbler

sings in my heart

4% survived

the Permian extinction,

giving rise

to all that lives . . .

and to my flightless hope

~Ribbons 13:1, Winter 2017