GLUM HAIKU
Doubly sad to see
long-buried hatchets dug up
with such clumsy haste.
LIBRARY GRIEF
Sno-pake whites out "Ice"
in the index to one class
of the Bliss schedule.
LIFE-PROCESSING BUGS
Wrong ends, touchiness,
perverse mutability,
and amnesia.
MUSICAL ALLUSION
"Those farewell chords are
from Strauss' Alpine symphony"
-- your note, twelve years back.
COUNTING BATS
Dusk in the garden;
the house like a photograph
of murders or ghosts.
Dimly grouped amid midges
we murmur, thirty-three, -four...
Today, according to the hashtag, is Haiku Poetry Day. The haiku above were written in an access of them in the autumn of 1995, and published in Cou-cous 10. Follow the label for others from the same batch.
The "farewell chords" referred to are the mountain theme of Richard Strauss' Alpine symphony. What I, synaesthetically, see through them is a red sun, probably rising not setting, over a very steep city -- Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds -- and a small group of people mourning a visionary who has just died.
Another hashtag tells me today is Bat Appreciation Day. The tanka 'Counting bats' is of the same vintage as the haiku. A kinsman had at that time a great enthusiasm for bats, and gathered a number of us in the garden to count them as they flew out from the roof at nightfall. Murders and ghosts, I'm happy to say, were completely lacking from this event, and their presence in the tanka is excused solely by poetic licence. Remembered dusk is two spaces for the imagination.
