poetry

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: circles and curves

 This week’s Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge is:  circles and curves

just myself

also, one fly

– an enormous house ~ Issa*

cee'sfotofuncircles

*cited in:

Inch by Inch

Trans: Nanao Sakaki

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: A Day in My Life

Is my mind elsewhere

Or has it simply not sung?

Hototogisu

~Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693)*

creating images

Weekly Photo Challenge: A Day in My Life. Another multi-photo challenge! Make sure you include picture captions to explain to people what they’re seeing, and experiment with the tiled galleries.

*Hototogisu, translated as cuckoo, wood thrush and sometimes nightingale.

The bird’s song is a strong but mournful cry.

It is said to die after singing 8,008 times.

It is also known as the “bird of time,”

“messenger of death” and “bird of disappointed love,”

and flies back and forth from this world to the next.

Confucian axiom: If one’s mind is elsewhere, one will look but not see, listen but not hear

cited in:

The Classic Tradition of Haiku

Edited by:  Faubion Bowers

photo friday: springtime

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape–the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.  Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. ~Andrew Wyeth*

photofridspring

Snow yet remaining

The evening slopes are misty –

An evening in spring. ~Iio Sogi**

cited in:

*John Connolly, The Wrath of Angels

**Faubion Bowers, The Classic Tradition of Haiku

accompany you home

leaf waterfall

Dear Larry,

as the winter winds travel across Wyoming’s landscape

the swirling snow releases its memories of you, lost upon Casper Mountain

its frigid touch awakens me to imagine your

aloneness in that wilderness of blinding snow

cries, deafened by the river of winds,

calling out in hope for

a human form to emerge out of the whiteness

the warmth of a human hand

the sound of a voice, comforting you

to accompany you home.

as I become lost within this winter’s swirling thoughts

the river winds tear into my soul

releasing tears arising from

the darkness of grief’s aloneness, seeking

a knowing to emerge out of ignorance’s darkness

you found peace

within a loving presence

that embraced you

and accompanied you home –

until then may refuge be found within the nature of things.

toddler shoe laces

thrift store1sign

toddler shoes in an antique store

Touching the present moment, we come to know the past created the present and together the future is being created. ~ Unknown

thrift store 2sign

shoe lace I

Just as you unreel the thread from a spool,

I want the past to become present.

thrift store 3sign

shoe lace II

The wife of Yoshitsune, a famous warrior in medieval Japan, wrote this farewell poem shortly after her spouse was deployed to the northern provinces where he later died.  She offers to us our creative ability to mentally bring the past alive and into the present.

thrift store 4sign

shoe lace III

… “Time goes from present to past.”  This is not true in our logical mind, but it is in the actual experience of making past time present.  There we have poetry, and there we have human life.

~ cited in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki

thrift store 5sign

shoe lace IV

weekly photo challenge: illumination

IN A NEW POST CREATED SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS CHALLENGE, SHARE A PICTURE THAT MEANS ILLUMINATION TO YOU.

Roget’s International Thesaurus: applying color, explanation, learning, lighting, ornamentation, painting, picture, radiation, teaching

how colorless, now–

fields where I took bush clover

for my garden ~Satomura Genjo

winter’s slumber before January’s snow

winter's slumber

winter’s slumber

weekly photo challenge: resolved

Share a picture which means RESOLVED to you!

intention

intention

Standing at the Threshold

With uncertainty, I question:

What is it that I seek?

Protection? Compassion? Acceptance? Forgiveness? Completion?

Who is it that I beckon?

A father? A mother? A sister? A brother? A companion? A child? A god?

To be? To endure? To offer? To embrace? To validate?

An intentional presence that is drawn upon

A place and time of shadows, myths, and dreams?

Birthed within a family?

Matured within a relationship?

Nourished within a community?

Where the Stillness within Silence,

Affirms the exchange of life’s giving and taking,

Embraces the connection of life’s emotional threads, and

Observes the interdependence of life with non-judgmental awareness,

Yet, knows of a united oneness with another that can not be?

Since it can not be, do I yearn

To know integration through the formation of thought;

To see clarity through the flowing of ink; and

To feel completion through the act of creating?

And then, finally, within the stillness of silence,

I befriend

An internal companion with whom

There is an honoring of the who and what of which I am;

A woman, a daughter, a sister, a niece, a wife, a mother, an aunt, a grandmother.

I touch

With reverence the presence of all that was, is, and will be.

I release

The seeking, the beckoning, the yearning to the Winds of Change.

I with uncertainty, Step over the Threshold

Foreseeing the return.

new year’s eve

leaf in infancy l

leaf in infancy l

leaf in infancy ii

leaf in infancy ii

You can learn about the pine only from the pine, or about the bamboo only from bamboo.  When you see an object, you must leave your subjective pre-occupation with yourself; otherwise you impose yourself on the object, and do not learn.  The object and yourself must become one, and from that feeling of oneness issues your poetry.  However well phrased it may be, if your feeling is not natural—if the object and our self are separate—then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit. ~ Basho*

On New Year’s Day

each thought a loneliness

as winter dusk descends ~Basho

Along my journey

through this transitory world,

new year’s housecleaning ~Basho

*cited in Issa’s The Year of My life.  Trans: Nobuyuki Yuasa