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

Many Happy Returns

I wonder what the baker’s assistant thought as she squeezed blue icing onto our sheet cake, spelling out the words ‘Happy 5,974^th Birthday, Mother Earth!’  My friends and I had just learned about Archbishop James Ussher, the 17^th-Century Primate of All Ireland who calculated the age of the Earth based in part on the Biblical ‘begats’ from Adam to Solomon. He concluded that the Earth was created at about 6:00 p.m. on October 22 in the year 4004 B.C. Giddy with our own youth, we reserved the shelter in our college arboretum for that chilly autumnal evening and celebrated the birthday of the Earth.

revelry

rouses the barred owl

to flight—

across spangles of moonlight

a silent shadow passes

That was 1970. Fast-forward forty years. No longer young, no longer giddy, I learn that those forty years have seen the disappearance of just over half the world’s wildlife.  Fish. Amphibians. Reptiles. Birds. Mammals.  Populations cut in half in just forty years, the prime years of my own eye-blink lifetime on a planet that has been wheeling about the sun for 4.5 billion years. Where life has been evolving for 3.8 billion years. Where vertebrates— fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals—have been flowing through their myriad, ever-changing panoply of forms for over 500 million years.

dinosaur feathers

shimmering in amber . . .

shards of light

in the slow kaleidoscope

                       of deep time

Five hundred million years arising . . . and half gone within my own brief lifespan?

giddy again

I cannot catch my breath--

as time whirls

on gargoyle wings

I join the danse macabre

~Earth: Our Common Ground anthology 2017

Credo

closing behind me

the blue door of a dream

I hear the words

don’t forget the absolute

yet love the leaves & branches

shadows

and shafts of silver light

in the pine wood

the owl glides through both

with unruffled wings

stripped

of the last bright leaf

of ego

my bones sing harmony 

with the winter wind

~red lights 13:1, Jan. 2017

The Forge

I had a ring once, made from a horseshoe nail.  Made for me by an Irish blacksmith, a wiry little man with a musical brogue, sinewy forearms, and a leather apron. He’d cradle a hoof on his knees and trim away the horny overgrowth with giant nippers, tossing aside the parings for the dogs to gnaw. Then he’d choose a cold shoe and slap it on, sizing it up with an expert eye.

The acrid smell of coal smoke . . . I can hear the whoosh of the bellows, see the flames blaze up as he waits for the iron shoe to glow red-hot. He holds it edgewise on the anvil with long-handled tongs and beats it into the perfect shape for this particular hoof, bouncing his hammer in a ringing diminuendo after each blow: BANG BUTabutabuta, BANG BUTabuta . . . He plunges the hot shoe into a bucket of water and fits it, still sizzling, onto the hoof, nailing it in place with just a couple of blows for each of the nails he holds handy between his lips. He clinches the nail points and shifts his shoulder to the mare’s flank.  I study my battered store-bought sneakers and inhale the heaven scent of hay.

tapping

the last syllables

into place . . .

the rhythm of hoofbeats,

the lift of white wings

~Haibun Today June 2015