Hate for School

I hated school. Truly hated it. I loved going to university though and went for a total of 8 years. I hated school so much that at my advanced age, I still shudder at the words “back to school”. I have no nostalgia, no wistful thoughts of back to school. Until I graduated from high school, I hated it. In Junior high, my mother started letting me take one day off a month to just not go.  God bless Mama.  For Amaya’s prompt at dVerse.

Hate for School
Back to school –
Pencils backpacks school bus –
To this day I still shudder.
I watch the school buses
carrying the children to school.
I cannot help but laugh and sing:
nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah
you have to go to school and I don’t.
nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah

Haibun: Housing Insecurity

Here in Richmond, as in most cities, there are lines of cheap motels that become nominal homes to the almost homeless. At the foodbank where I volunteer time, the people with their children come in for their daily meal. They are always polite, the children often shy or charming. You learn a lot working among the poor. A quadrille from De today using the word box or forms of box at dVerse Poets Pub.  Will also be sharing at Real Toads Tuesday Platform. A quadrille is a form unique to dVerse with exactly 44 words excluding the title and using the prompted word.  Also today at Poets United, Sherry has an excellent feature about the grieving orca. I have a poem or two in it:  http://poetryblogroll.blogspot.com/2018/08/poems-of-week-whale-heard-around-world.html

Housing Insecurity
She and her brother from another father sleep in boxes on top of the dresser in the hotel room shared with her mother and four siblings. Roaches ran over them at night.
hot summer days
they play behind the hotel –
toys from dumpsters

photo from the Richmond Times Dispatch

1000 Miles Later

for Poets United Poetry Pantry

1000 Miles Later
Seventeen days 1,000 miles later
Talequah has dropped her dead calf.
Perhaps she is no longer sad and has
accepted the inevitability of death and life –
Perhaps she was where she wanted to bury
her dead calf – perhaps her heart said
Let go.
I picture the dead calf slowly sinking
to rest upon the bottom on the sand
asleep and at peace at last.
Talequah is healthy and leaping in the ocean.
The heart can only take so much grief
before it kills you
or sets you free.
We humans saw and wept with her.
Now perhaps she is telling us to move on,
to leap with joy, to wipe our tears.
I have been carrying my dead mother
for over a year.
The heart can only take so much grief
Before it kills you or sets you free.
I am sitting on my back porch
listening to the birds singing,
taking in the warmth of the sun,
watching the clouds dance overhead.
It is time.
It is time.
It is time.

onenews.com

Hidden Perseids

Sherry at Real Toads is tasking us to take a line from a poem and make it the first line of a new poem – a piggy back poem.  The first line is taken from Sweeney Among the Nightingales by T.S. Eliot, one of my favorite poets.

Hidden Perseids
“Writing anything is a treason of sorts.” Anthony Bourdain

Gloomy Orion and the Dog are veiled;
Dog days. Sweltering hot and steamy.
The night is cloudy covering the moon
and hiding the stars.
I was hoping to watch the Perseids.
The Swift-Tuttle is hiding its face tonight.
No grains of sand being set afire
as they fall to earth.
I wait for the fires in the sky.
The Dog wanders willy-nilly trying to get
Orion to play.
It is too hot and Orion is all out of fun.
I sigh deeply.
I put my head down on my knees
and listen to the mocking bird copying
the blackbird. The fire is there.
I just am blind to it.

Perseids – NASA

 

August Moon

For Suman’s midweek challenge at Poets United. We are to write a poem about poeming. Also posting on dVerse’s OLN.

August Moon
Under the full August moon
I listen to the cicadas singing.
Their rasping and sawing pulls apart
the silence like an old woman
pulling apart the curtains of her bedroom window.
I sit on the back steps listening
to their music.
*Amanogawa flows by silently.
In my head
the poem begins to form.

*Amanogawa – Japanese for River of Heaven or, the Milky Way

copyright kanzensakura

 

The Wake

orca with dead calf

The Wake
Talequah carries her dead baby gently –
either by the fin or on her nose,
refusing to let go of the calf who died
within a half hour of her birth.
The mother kept using her nose to push the baby to the surface –
She is hungry.
The bones of her skull can be seen through her depleted blubber.
Salmon farms are starving a race of beings out of existence,
Talequah carries her dead baby,
day after day.
Her pod is helping her carry her baby
mourning the loss of her baby with her.
They communicate with each other
in a complicated language only they can understand.
They mourn in their unique rituals,
forming circles around the mother –
Like a human wake.
Like mothers holding close the mother
whose baby has died,
crooning and holding the mother close.
We are starving this race,
We are depleting this race,
We are lessening their birth rate.
We are killing a race
more human than we are ourselves
who think only of courselves,
not caring who we kill
in our killing of this planet.
Talequah carries her baby gently.
The mother continues to mourn.

Hiroshima Day

A haibun for Frank’s prompt at dverse for Hiroshima Day.  Will also be posting on Real Toads Tuesday Platform.

On July 8, 1853, American Commodore Matthew Perry led his four ships into the harbor at Tokyo Bay, seeking to re-establish for the first time in over 200 years regular trade and discourse between Japan and the western world. Ironically, on August 6, amost 100 years later, America dropped the first of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima. People were going about their normal activities that day. Women were shopping for food to prepare for dinner that night. Children were playing and men were going about their business preparing to continue facing off against the Americans. They went about with living not knowing death was in the skies.

Suddenly the sky turned white and within a few seconds Hiroshima was almost obliterated from the face of the earth. The death toll was approximately 90,000 – 120,000 men, women, and children. Some walked after the blast until they collapsed and died. Others died of burns and being crushed by falling buildings. Skeletons could be seen in the debris. Still later, people died from bone marrow disease from the extreme radiation. A few skeletal structures remained standing, notably the white gate Shinto. “Photos” of people etched into stone by the blast- their bodies obliterated but replaced by the radiation remained. We bear a guilt so deep time will never leach it from our bones as the bomb turned people and buildings, plants, and animals into dust.

children jumping rope
on hot August day – becoming
shadows forever

shadow images of children remain when the A Bomb hit Hiroshima