V E R S E and I M A G E

Of the stomach lifting. Of the weightless

where I was and am again variety.

Sway and crack, our craft. Slalom

the wind. So much carbon in the currents.

Of the climate kind. Of the jerk and twack.

Of the hurtling toward. Shake right out

of our human. As if we might not

settle back into these bodies,

but land instead in someone else.

Yet the hare far below isn’t empty

to receive us. Neither is the horse.

They have their own embodied plans.

We will have to settle beside ourselves

Blurred boundaries and all. Bump,

rattle, and creak. Our enlightened selves

grasp cokes, play solitaire, read, sleep,

going on as if what’s happening isn’t.

With more than prayers

holding us up, we are nonetheless

tossed in the vastness.

from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.

❦ ❦ ❦

Bashō (1644-1694)

Basho has perfectly snared my mood this morning. I am reading Spring haiku at SeasonWords.com: Ah, Winter vanquished!, Ah, new life!, blah, blah, blah. I am not feeling newly lively these days, especially not as the sun so gaily rises. By day I seem to be the rock between two storms, my father and my son, but by 4 AM I have eroded to sand and the bed is far too gritty for sleep. Now this haiku blog offers a prompt for the season and encourages sharing? Here are my Spring lines:

what to say

when everyone’s “spring, spring” –

toads trilling

In her book Haiku and Senryu: A Simple Guide for All, Charlotte Digregorio states, Wherever one lives, one experiences changing seasons. The haiku’s brief flash illuminates one specific moment. We read the terse lines and might recognize where we are, but certainly, and more critically, we do know precisely when we are. Perhaps we have never shared the haiku’s circumscribed space, but we do share the time of pollen, the humidity, crisp crackling leaves, the shivers. A moment’s experience broadens into a communal truth.

In that sense, haiku becomes less an instruction in encountering nature and more an invitation to shared humanity. Besides the experience of changing seasons, the thing we all share is the experience of suffering. A moment’s observation may stand in as a piercing metaphor: Spring’s anticipation, Summer’s lassitude, Autumn’s anxiety, Winter’s dread. And perhaps pricked by that dart of connection upon reading a haiku, we might also share one more thing – joy.

Just to be fair, I imagine my Spring haiku is not really an indictment of inane people chattering around me. On a dark night after rain, the lonesome trill of an American toad rising from down in the woods is a peace offering. My son and I stood on the deck last night and heard it together. Yes, it was very dark. This morning, light has returned. Again. Oh my. The season rolls on.

❦

In 1685, the Japanese astronomer Shibukawa Shunkai adapted the 24 Solar Terms of the Chinese calendar for Japan and created 72 seasons. As we learn at SeasonWords.com, these 72 seasons “offer a poetic journey through the Japanese year in which the land awakens and blooms with life and activity before returning to slumber.” Mark, the site’s curator and naturalist, shares lessons from nature corresponding to the seasons; haiku both ancient and modern that complement the lesson; and craft tips / kigo with a prompt and an invitation. Readers share their haiku and receive commentary.

Visit https://seasonwords.com/ and subscribe to receive periodic postings in your mailbox!

❦ ❦ ❦

1.

One day I found the outline of a deer

in the snow. She’d slept on the old logging road

above our home, curled against the cold.

Her imprint on a trail I’d walked for

twenty years was intricate and vulnerable

as I now feel since strangers bought this land.

2.

At first I waved. New to the neighborhood,

the seemed shy. Hovering at the side

of the road with their harnessed dogs, they walked

harnessed too, shoulders hunched, eyes averted.

About their money I didn’t then know, or

Appalachian families letting go of land.

3.

What we had of commons among

hill people here is gone, our hollow hollowed

out, our waves, our lifted heads, our calls across

casual borders fretted now by registered

mail. “Not authorized.” “Legal action.” They’ve

no bonds to sunder because they’ve no bonds made.

4.

Surveyed for surveillance, the ridge. But I

can love what I don’t own. I miss the oaks,

their wide-girthed stillness. I miss the mountain’s

spine. Across family lands and state lines,

through Cherokee and Appalachian time,

the mountains stay. The mountains stay. They stay.

from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.

❦ ❦ ❦

Creatures – so we are. We seek what all creatures seek, but especially we seek the closeness of other creatures. Kathryn Kirkpatrick is visited by crows and grieves for house wrens dying and for cows separated from their calves. She reveals her creature’s struggle and confusion as she loses her mother. She is not afraid to say that she hesitates to speak of death because every creature must face death but fears to do so. She reveals moments and connections and we readers look about us to discover her light is casting our own shadow. And in the closing section of Creature, Kathryn Kirkpatrick has written the finest collection of dog poems I’ve read in twenty years.

Creature by Kathryn Kirkpatrick at Jacar Press: HERE.

❦ ❦ ❦

And whatever love a parent

feels stealing bread for a starving

child, I have it as I dig by

the flimsy light of my bargain

headlamp, having driven miles for the last

of the chain-store milkweed, which will

feed these ravenous young in their striped

skins, who are no metaphor, who stand for

themselves only, though in my ecological

worry, my long-range fright, I am surely

standing for something as I shovel in the dark.

from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.

❦ ❦ ❦