Seven Thousand Red Leaves

The cloudy afternoon through the red maple –
painted leaves, inked branches, white paper sky.
This could be a haiku about spring
here seven thousand miles away from Osaka
where every line counts as seven beats.

I am an itinerant poet

traveling a circuit from place to place,
not dropping haiku gently in cold snow,
white spring petals or the whispering river.
A knight-errant journeying home and neighborhood on walks
and tossing poems up into the air.

Whitman

Walt, born 1819. He moved around frequently
but at the end of his life
he settled where I started – New Jersey – 
which has more poetry than most imagine, 
and ghosts reciting from Camden to Newark.

Walt Whitman’s home on Mickle St. in Camden, New Jersey

The Virus Poems

We’re writing poems about the virus pandemic,
full of quarantine, social distancing, home sheltering,
sickness, and death in numbers so large
as to be incomprehensible – oh, for poems
not of a time but for time.

Meditation on Birdsongs

Black-capped_Chickadee at a suet feeder

The welcoming sunlight forced my eyes closed – 
into meditation mode: white-throated sparrow’s simple notes
of three/four; harsh jay’s single screech bu
no Barred Owl’s “Who cooks for you.”
Sets of three-noted refrains – Black-capped Chickadees feeding.

 

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I have been trying in recent years to be able to identify some common avian visitors to my neighborhood by their songs. “Songs” may seem grandiose for some of these simple notes. I suspect they are melodic sentences, though they do seem to repeat a chorus or refrain. You can hear these songs at allaboutbirds.org. Perhaps, some birds write haiku, while others prefer free verse or their own kind of villanelles.

Ode for Stanley in His Garden

some of Vincent van Gogh’s irises

It’s early for irises, Stanley. But today

daffodils are shouting yellow and white calls

to me from my garden, “Come outside!

Leave that poem for tonight! Touch blooms!”

Maybe it was you, Stanley, calling me.