Poetry Month: April

The poets in droves

Lick their pens, salivating

Over metaphors, images, turning

Death into Life. It must be

Poetry Month.

frances

A Wordsworth Tree Brings Solace

A Wordsworth Tree Brings Solace

 

When Raj went to Hawaii in 2013, she remembered my children’s  book Wordsworth! Stop the Bulldozer. Wordsworth and his friends write  poetry to save trees and Wordsworth asks readers to plant a Wordsworth tree. Raj brought two Palomia seeds back to Sacramento. The Royal Palomia took root.

Raj deeply believed that the tree would show its first blossom during her mother’s last year as she lived with Alzheimer’s Disease. It did. The tree bloomed for the first time soon after her mother died. Yesterday, we sat before the blossoming Palomia to honor the memory of Raj’s mother. We sipped tea and marveled how Alzheimer’s Disease had brought all of us together.

To William ( Wordsworth)

It wasn’t a host of golden daffodils

Not even one thousand,

But I did gaze – and gazed –

My heart did with pleasure fills

It was only one, the first of spring –

And I did wander lonely as a cloud.

A poet could not but be gay.

In daffodils, one or ten thousand.

 

Papaya haiku

 

Ah Chameleon

You turn the ordinary

Into a haiku.

 

How can a lizard

Create such pure elegance

On  a papaya?

Ignorance: Alive and Doing Well in Sacramento

As soon as I took a seat in the waiting room, a man looked at me and this is our conversation:

Man: Where were you born?

Me: Born and raised in Hawaii.

Man: Hawaii. Those people are the most negative.

Me: Negative?

Man: In Hawaii, what do you say to people when you leave?

Me: Aloha?

Man: What do you say when you meet someone?

Me: Aloha?

Man began to explain his views on how these two words were soooo native-like and I wasn’t even in a grass skirt with a bone through my nose.

I was called in for my appointment so I looked at him and said, “Aloha.”

I wish I had said the following:

1. There’s another meaning of Aloha. We say Aloha when we want to say Butt Off, Idiot.
2. I was born on one of those newly found planets.
3. On a bed, on clean sheets.

 

Cow 1 is not Cow 2(coined by Semanticist Hayakawa)

Under the rising sun

The enemy came

Wearing my face.

 

And so we all became the enemy.

The enemy on December 7^th who wore my face is not me.

A Muslim  terrorist is not my neighbor from Syria.

That black man who robbed me at gun point is not the next black man I see.

We may dress as, or wear the same face of your enemy, but know this:

Cow 1 is not Cow 2.

 

http://sacb.ee/8EMK

Do check out my story in the Sacramento Bee that came out today in the Forum Section.