Something Simple on a Sunday - Haiku

Have a poetic week!

5-7-5

A sprinkling of summer haiku . . .

sound of a mower

and it's eight o'clock at night

must be summertime

hear the cicadas

as they all sing the same song

but you can't see them

turf wars with the weeds

a battle i'll never win

humbly i concede

little feathered friends

finding damp spots in the shade

trying to stay cool

Haiku Festival

Yeah! It's finally here! The Haiku Festival. I chose just a handful of my haiku to include here. Last year I put together a small scrapbook of my haiku with some of my (very amateur) Chinese brush paintings and various photos that fit the haiku. It was great fun. Of course I've written many more since then, and may include more in some future post. But for now . . .

morning clouds lifting,
not ready for sunrise yet,
cling to mountaintops

pink clouds dance to an
orchestra of crickets
end of summer day

different birdsongs
some trilling, some staccato
fill the cool morning

falling leaves gather
in red and gold mosaic
carpeting the earth

robin’s song is bright
like dew drops in morning sun
glad for the new day

dragonfly hovers
over the cut blades of grass
while i’m in corpse pose

anticipation
weighs down the limbs with green fruit
on the orange tree

P.S. The last one, anticipation, won second place in a local poetry contest last year! No big prizes, but it was quite a cool surprise!

P.P.S. Click on the Haiku Festival button on your right to go to Pink Purl for a list of other participants in the Haiku Festival. And thank you Tracy and Elizabeth for the wonderful idea and opportunity to share!

Roadmaps of the Blogosphere

You never know what you'll find!

I am constantly amazed by the time warp that mysteriously, but routinely, occurs each night when I sit down at my computer. I come in to sit down for just a few minutes – long enough to read e-mail and my favorite blogs (which list is growing at an alarming rate!). I always have whatever book I’m currently reading in my hand and tell myself that I’ll stay at the computer for just a few minutes. Then I’ll go curl up in my reading chair, under my reading lamp, under the picture (that I love) of a girl sitting in her library reading, and I’ll read. I’ll read for a couple of hours, I tell myself, and maybe even finish the book I’m reading. Then I can go sort through the pile of new books waiting to be read and pick the next one. It’s gonna be great!

But more often than not, that doesn’t happen. (I’m sorry my dear, sweet books! I do love you and I promise I’ll take a whole day real soon and spend it entirely with you! No computer at all!) I’m sure it’s happened to you. You are poking through one of your favorite blogs, or your favorite website. There may be a link there to another blog or another article. Or you may stumble across the name of a place, or a person, or a thing that you’ve never heard of before. Or maybe you think you’ve heard of it before, but you’re not really sure what or who or where it is. And you have to Google it to find out more about it. (I mean you have to, right? In order to fully understand what it is you’re reading?) So you click on the link, or do a web search for that person, place or thing. And five seconds later . . . well, I don’t really need to spell this out for you.

Three hours and 18 blogs and 6 websites and 4 Google searches later, you’re scratching your head (or your chin or your elbow) and wondering how you got here and what it was you sat down to read in the first place.

And so it is that I stumbled across a great page tonight in just this fashion. Well, a shortened version of it anyway. And I was able to backtrack to each of the pages that ultimately led me to the page that I was meant to see.

I started here - in my list of "The Blogs I Want To Be When I Grow Up" - moments of perfect clarity.

http//julochka.blogspot.com/










From here, I went to "Regular Reads" - Soul Aperture

http://soulaperture.blogspot.com/2009/05/at-days-end.html




And next I went to:

http://pinkpurl.typepad.com/pink_purl/2009/04/haiku-festival.html#comments











A haiku festival!?! I love haiku! I Twitter haiku all the time! (And yes, I sent the link to my fellow Twitter haiku writers.) I will post my haiku on May 11th, but for now . . . a Blogger haiku:

a blogosphere map
virtual paths and byways
of the universe.