loss–dVerse Haibun Monday, Hanami

loss

When cherry blossoms
scatter –
no regrets

Issa

I slept last night beneath our cherry tree, its branches bare of blossoms after the early freeze—this loss, a surprise, much like the morning I awakened and you were gone. Life goes on, so the cliché would have me believe, but the void inside looms, ever-present, like the weight of snow this seemingly endless winter.

Am I to believe that love will return, much like the cherry blossoms I hope for in another springtime?

Will I be one with you again, once I follow you into the void? I reach for the soft assurance of the touch of satin, the flowering branch I culled before cruel winds doused my hope. I listen to silence.

hanami whispers
what appears lost shall return
do not be afraid

Today a dVerse Haibun Monday, Kansen Sakura invites us to consider the Japanese concept of hanami. What? You don’t know what that is? Come over to dVerse and learn about it.

My reflections on the Easter Season which many of us celebrated yesterday influenced my haibun–what do the seasons, typified here in the mystique of cherry blossoms, have to teach us about doubt and faith?

Photo: dautrich
Labeled for noncommercial reuse

 

 

And I Will Die–NaPoWriMo #3

Image via Wikipedia

On that morning
     birds will shatter stillness
     chant their purty, purty, purty
     languish in the heady scent of citrus blooms

On that morning
     light will slip through gauzy curtains while
     dust motes dance, abandoned to
     the whisperings of April’s breath

On that morning
     clouds will roll in like frothy waves
     stretch to lick the azure sky
     dissolve into fragments of remembrance

On that morning
     alone in the first kiss of dawn
     I will die
     and live again.

Written for the third day’s challenge at NaPoWriMo: http://www.napowrimo.net/

And they gave us this one: Here’s a third prompt for those of you who like to get ahead of the curve. This one is adapted from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, a book my parents gave me when I was 14 or so and they noticed I was constantly scribbling things down. So here goes: Cesar Vallejo wrote a pretty famous poem that begins with him saying that he will die in Paris, in the rain, on a Thursday (different translations from the Spanish make it hard to quote precisely in English). So go ahead and write a poem predicting your own death — at night in Omaha at the Shell Station, in an underwater Mexican grotto after a dry spell. It’s less morbid than you think!

Submitted to One Shot Wednesday: http://onestoppoetry.com/

Big Tent Poetry–The Gospel According to St. John

Image via Wikipedia

This is submitted to Big Tent Poetry. This week’s prompt was a wordle with what seemed to me to be a most unlikely assortment of words. This was what came up for me although, granted, there were no boiler rooms in the time of Christ–that one was a stretch although, if you’ve ever been in a boiler room it is a bit reminiscent of hell. The one word I could not make happen was forklift!

Check out some great poetry for the prompt at:  http://bigtentpoetry.org/

 

 

The Gospel According to St. John

Time passed slowly that afternoon.
Blood flowed like lava into my cupped hand.

The man who hung upon a rough hewn tree
should have reigned over lush gardens of creation.

The night before I’d struggled to remain awake,
but now I stood by the mother until he passed

into the boiler room of hell. We remained there
to receive his body, returned it to the earth,

sealed the tomb with the clunk of a massive boulder.
After the Sabbath, the Phoenix resurfaced from the ash-pit.

Now I write his story, dipping the nib of my pen
in the sanguine ink of eternal mysteries.

Jingle’s Poetry Rally–“April Eighth”

English: Full-length photograph of the Shroud of Turin which is said to have been the cloth placed on Jesus at the time of his burial. Română: O repoducere fotografică în întregime a Sfântului Giulgiului despre care se spune că a fost folosit pentru a acoperi corpul lui Iisus în timpul înmormântării sale. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An article in the Smithsonian
alluded to the Holy
Shroud of Turin.
The image of Christ
seared radiologically
into a burial cloth.
A violent burst of energy.
A life-seed
in a closed space
blowing out boundaries.
Stories of an empty tomb.

Easter comes early
this year.
Daffodils explode in
the front garden,
sheltered by a warm wall.

April eighth,
nineteen forty-four.
A seed plummets to earth,
wrapped in a metal
death-womb.
Ejaculated from heaven,
it burrows into dank soil.
Buried.
Fragmented.
Combusted in another
surge of energy.

Months go by:
a year to the day.
Someone in the
War Department
types the letter on
a piece of onion-skin paper.
Words smudged by an
over-used ribbon tell
the woman to move on with her life.
The child will never call him
daddy.

Footnote: a few years ago Easter Sunday landed on April 8th, the anniversary of my father’s death. He was killed in WWII when I was 3 months old.