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1 July 2004. Today, four of my haiku:
oak's breeze-rustled few leaves
dark against the weatern sun's
orange silence
19 April 1976
Briefly,
as the wind picks up:
all the huge flag's stars
19 July 1977
one more year's last leaf
inspires one more year's last haiku
on a year's last leaf
vember morni
eet's 3 tilted umbrel
llow, green, ora
19 October 1977
These were all from Bonsai, which folded after the last publishing the last two. That was a particular disappointment, for "vember morni" had been put in a special workshop section the editor had begun. Readers were asked to critique it, for publication--and the author's response. It would have been fun. The poem is the only "experimental" one I had published during those years. I hope everyone will realize it's a scene through a wiped spot in a window. I may re-do it in Paint Shop to make that more obvious. It appeared in my very first book, a 1966 self-published collection of visual haiku I called Poemns.
The haiku about the year's last leaf is my most reprinted haiku: I later got it into Modern Haiku, the only haiku I ever got into that publication except for ones of mine I put in essays I wrote for it. Years later, LeRoy Gorman used in in a Haiku Canada anthology he edited. It's amusing, I suppose, but nothing more.
The top haiku is a nice vivid scene, I guess. I liked the use of a color to describe something auditory, but that's a common technique of mine (and others). As for the flag poem, it was out of real life: somewhere in the San Fernando Valley (where I wrote all these haiku), I was surprised by a nearby service station's enormous flag when the wind abruptly blew it straight out. I'm not a big fan of Our Flag, for I consider it aesthetically deficient: all straight lines and primary colors; and I partly blame it for the fascist idiots who take it as something so sacred we should drop freedom of expression to keep yo-yos from defiling; and I'm no foaming patriot (though I do--forgive me--think America superior to any other country I know of); but I have to admit that the sudden colors and stars of the flag were quite a dramatic yow, for me.
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