A Living Haiku Greeted Me This Morn

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A morning walk

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Thank you black crow

For your company this morn.

Are you Poe’s raven

Calling Nevermore?

 

Thank you majestic oak

For the symphony above

Hi C’s, low C’s

A chorus of chirps, baton free.

 

Oh, sparrows, sparrows

Wait, wait, you can’t go

Seven on a telephone line,

Complete your haiku ere you go.

 

Such was my walk this Friday morn,

Around the silent mall

With nature’s best

For companionship.

 

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Haiku inspired by Morikami Museum

The sound of my shoes

Breaks the silence of the fog.

Forgive my entrance.

 

The trees move slowly

Against the cold morning skies…

Or is it the fog?

 

The sound of geta…

A Samurai’s swinging sword..

A  silence, broken.

 

 

Haiku inspired by photo: frances kakugawa

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A Matter of Perception

A Matter of Perception

The weeds have been crying for a weeder for weeks.

Still frozen in my winter lazy bones, I thought surely I can find a way to

get out of this…a little boy came to mind.

When I was a student in College of Educ, the professor demonstrated “how to read a story to 4 year olds.” Before she  could begin, a little boy asked, “Teacher, why is your hair all grey?”

Before she could respond, another boy turned toward the little boy and said, “Her hair not grey, her hair silver.”

So I took off my garden gloves and walked away, “Dem weeds not weeds, dem weeds flowers.”

 

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A Tree Speaks

I took this photo during a walk around the neighborhood. That eye spoke to me …

Tree

I  see you.

Put that saw away.

You will not use my sisters and brothers

To fill your bank account

With Real Estate towers.

 

I see you.

Put that saw down.

Look up at my glory,

Home to hundreds of life

More than you can accommodate

In your blue-printed home of destruction.

 

See me.

Before it is too late.

Frances Kakugawa 2-5-19

 

 

 

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First Camelia

Brings gasps of joy

In Winter’s cold.

I, the third born –

What accompanied my birth?

2-5-19

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My first 2019 Poem

Dear 21^st Century Farmer,

Each time you place a seed into your soil,

What do you think about?

 

Do you think of fast cash

To replace your brain

For a larger, more digitized tractor?

Insect  eradication for abundant crops?

Vocabulary rested on faster, more, faster, more

Or do faces of your grandchildren, their grandchildren

Play among the images in your head?

The inheritors of your soil.

 

Each time you place a seed into your soil,

Do you get down on your back,

Look up at white clouds dancing, dancing –

Pesticides free, gathering raindrops

For Earth’s  purification?

 

Each time you place a seed into your soil,

Can  you take a fistful of soil –

Taste the taste of soil

As they were before you were courted

By “Big 6” pesticide and GMO corporations –

BASF, Bayer, Dupong, Dow Chemical Co. Monsanto, Syngenta ?

 

Oh, farmer of the 21^st century,

Are you indignant of  these questions?

Let me hear then, your “How dare you.”

How dare you

Question the integrity of my soul.

How dare you

Before my grandchildren

And their future children.

I     am    not     a     farmer    for    sale.

Frances H Kakugawa

Frances H Kakugawa.

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Message from Wordsworth

How do you like my Holiday tree with so many golden balls…a natural and real tree. To all you readers who, after reading my Wordsworth! Stop the Bulldozer! book, began to use trees whose roots are still in rich healthy soil, thank you for keeping our planet green. To you, too, who have stopped cutting down trees. Wait, there’s more. See my bulldozer poem under my tree.

The Bulldozer

there was place I sat and dreamed

to music played in my concert grove

 

branches rubbed against branches

coconuts dropped to the ground…

vines snaked and squeaked their way

seeking the hot noon sun.

 

frilly fronds danced the wind

lacy limbs brushed their leaves…

sparrows, mynahs spattered notes

low c’s, high c’s and in-between.

 

a place for cellos, violins

trombones, tubas, crashing  brass…

flutes, piccolos, clarinets ,too

a symphony of purest sound.

 

up and down the scale

notes played every key…

in this place I called my grove

until the monster came.

 

he gobbled up notes

oh, what a hungry beast…

he ate and ate, grunted and groaned

until there was nothing left

nothing at all.

from: Wordsworth! Stop the Bulldozer!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Good Morning!

I am but a morning glory

A fleeting face at Dawn.

In the midst of Chaos,

For one breathless moment,

I bring Joy! Joy!

 

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3 of my favorite quotes for Poetry Month

 

“There is no poetry for the practical man. There is poetry only for the mankind of the man who spends a certain amount of his life turning the mechanical wheel. But let him spend too much of his life at the mechanics of practicality and either he must become something less than a man, or his very mechanical efficiency will become impaired by the frustrations stored up in his irrational human personality.
An ulcer, gentlemen, is an unkissed imagination taking its revenge for having been jilted. It is an unwritten poem, a neglected music, an unpainted water color, an undanced dance. It is a declaration from the mankind of the man that a clear spring of joy has not been tapped, and that it must break through, muddily, on its own.”
– John Ciardi

 

“Poems are not written to sing of the moon and flowers; they must speak of our hearts in response to the moon and flowers. We must never forget that in our hearts are the seeds of our poems. If we merely speak of the moon and flowers, poems become simply poetical forms, whatever the human heart may be. If these things become a part of ourselves, then we may admire them in verse.”
– Okuman Kotomichi
19th century

 

“A haiku . . . is a hand beckoning, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature. It is a way in which the cold winter rain, the swallows of evening, even the very day in its hotness, and the length of the night become truly alive, share in our humanity, speak their own silent and expressive language.”

— R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 1, page 243

 

 

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