Thursday, October 26, 2017

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





Friday, October 20, 2017

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