HAIKU NOVENA AT OAK HILL

MY HAIKU  EXPERIMENT

I guess this was  bound to happen--I  want to share some of the haikus I have written recently.  You know about the Haiku  experiment I tried with a series of  9 Haiku grouped in a kind of poetic Novena.  I ended  up  composing  several of these Novenas because I  kept on veering into new subject areas and would see that it was a new grouping. 

With my attention in the  past month caught up in grieving, I suppose that it is only to be expected that this concern with the dead might show up in my Haiku writing. Especially because Haiku --I now understand--is a  form of contemplative practice that does seem to tap our deepest and not always conscious thoughts. It connects a momentary glimpse of something in nature with a  personal emotional place.

  

I offer these as a humble gift back to the ongoing and unsurpassed example left to us

 by MASTER POET BASHO

HAIKU NOVENA AT OAK HILL

1.

Sky darkens, rain pelts

you went for a walk today

you'll get soaked, come home.

2.

You come through the door,

you made it home, thunder claps,

so do I, we laugh.

3.

How narrow the gate

and how constricted the road

who find it are few.

4.

Told your sister died

you placed a single red rose

before her picture

5.

On a leafy bank

green ferns wave their lacy fronds

Is there a fragrance?

6.

Summer solstice here--

brown sparrow perched on birdhouse

last one you built me

7.

Oak's secret garden

leafy shade lures us through gates

find a place apart

8.

This ground is sacred:

Union soldiers dug their graves

left to free the slaves.

9.

Tiger lilies bloom

blaze orange among tombstones

Indomitable.