It’s the end of June. ybonesy and I will be traveling over the next two weeks. Different times and separate destinations. Expect slight delays, possible blasts of summer rain, seeds of a sunset poppy, the beat of a gyrfalcon.
Tonight I feel like poetry. Away from home, there is ground in the simple. A blinding light pours through the picture window. And I am not alone.
Fourth Moon (June)
by Li Ho
Cool dawns and dusks
lots of shade
a thousand emerald mountains
rising toward the clouds
a fragrant rain
patters through green foliage
thick leaves and blossoms
shine behind gates
water in the pools
quivers with green ripples
in heavy summer
blossoms expect to fall
fading red flowers
glowing in light and shade.
…every day he would go out riding on a donkey….with a tapestry bag. As he wandered through the countryside, he would compose poems and toss them into the bag. At home in the evening, he would dump out his day’s work and finish the poems, allegedly provoking his mother’s comment: “My son will not stop until he has vomited out his heart.”
-from 12 Poems on the Months by Li Ho (791-817)
Five Tang Poets, Translated and introduced by David Young
Oberlin College Press, 1990
-related to these two posts:
Among Ruins – Li Ho (791-817)
Tu Mu on Li Ho, 15 years after his death
Saturday, June 30th, 2007
I love your owns words…
“a blinding light pours through the picture window…and I am not alone”
So much said in so few words
Thanks, Heather. I’ve been wanting to write more haiku lately. Maybe I’ll be inspired next week, when I’m back in Taos.
More inspiration from Wang Wei (699-759):
Spring in the Garden
After a night of rain
I go out, wearing clogs
wrapped in an old overcoat
against the spring cold
water pours white
through the open dikes
peach blossoms glow red
beyond the willows
fields of new grass spread away
edged and checkered
poles rise from the wells
at the wood’s edge
I go back in
to write at my small desk
evening arrives, I’m alone
happy among green weeds.
Spring in the Garden by Wang Wei (699-759)
Five Tang Poets, Translated and introduced by David Young
Oberlin College Press, 1990
[...] The word haibun can be applied to longer works, such as the memoirs, diaries, or travel writings of haiku poets. According to Contemporary Haibun Online, haibun is the Japanese name for 17th Century monk Basho [...]