I tried to write some haiku while I was on my Oregon holiday, but my brain seemed to want to turn off and just enjoy. This is all I came up with:

particles of sand

fly like a swarm of insects

nipping at my skin

Haiku traditionally begins with a seasonal reference. This goes back to old Japan when haiku was part of a party game. The host often started off the game by poviding the opening stanza (called hokku), and the guests took turns adding stanzas to create a longer linked poem (known as renga). The seasonal reference in the opening line was a way of dating the poem (or at least letting people know in which season it was written). The party poets took their renga seriously, and eventually a book of rules was created, which included lists of objects (mostly plants and animals) associated with each season. The opening hokku written at parties was often more popular and better remembered than the rest of the renga, and eventually it became an independant poetry form called haiku.

My list of seasonal objects for June would have to include cottonwood seed fluffs (first one or two, then hundreds float through the air and collect like snow along roadside curbs), mock orange blossoms (the bush in the photo above started as an unidentifiable bare stick that I almost pulled out of the ground), and shedding dog hair (our dog, Dylan, sheds so much that we’d be knee-deep in dog hair if I didn’t vacuume every day).

first cottonwood fluff

drifting over my backyard

summer I was twelve

white dome of flowers

as tall as the neighbour’s house

began as a weed

white flower beacons

glow as the evening light fades

calling out with scent

fur falls to the floor

as I scratch my dog’s backside

it doesn’t matter

I like the way people in Japan celebrate cherry blossoms. Families and friends gather under the flowering trees to stroll, take photos, admire the blossoms and picnic (it is not all quiet and contemplation, though, as there is often a lot of alcohol and the occassional portable karaoke machine).

Cherry blossom viewing has its own term, hanami. A variation of hanami is yozakura, night-time viewing. People hold parties under the trees at night, and many a haiku has been written about cherry blossoms in the moonlight. In the old days, lanterns and torches would have been added to shine light on the blossoms. Today, people bring portable generators to power spot lights. People eat, drink and talk and occassionally look up and comment on the beauty of the blossoms. The short lifespan of the flowers makes the occassion particularly special.

Celebrating the blossoms here in Canada is mostly a solitary activity (though I’m happy to say, the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival is working to make it more a part of our culture — at least here in the lower mainland). For now, I celebrate by going for extra walks down streets lined with blossoming trees and paying visits to my favourite trees. It’s hard to hold a party under the blossoms when most of the flowering trees are along streets, but just standing under them is a party for the senses.

I took the above photos the last week in March, then on April 1st and 2nd, it snowed (like nature was playing an April Fool’s joke), prompting this haiku:

snow on pink blossoms

winter, reluctant to leave

turns for one last kiss

Now, only four days later, it’s as warm as summer, and people are wearing shorts and t-shirts. It wont last, but I think it’s finally safe to say Good-bye Winter!

Vancouver Cherry Blossom site:

http://www.vancouvercherryblossomfestival.com/

scent of blossoms

lures me down one more street

lightens my feet

first sunny weekend

for once the crows are silent

beaks full of nest twigs

sunlit seagulls sail

across a blue sea of sky

beacons of light

When I was in grade seven, I used to walk to the local library every Friday after school (about two miles) to drop off last week’s books and select the next week’s. The way I picked the books I wanted to borrow was to walk along the shelves of novels in the children’s section until a spine or cover jumped out at me. This method led me to discover some of my favourite books, including “The Court of the Stone Children” by Eleanor Cameron, “The Book of Three” by Lloyd Alexander (which led me to all of the Prydain Chronicles) and “False Dawn” by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (a graphic science fiction novel, which, as I pointed out to the librarian after I’d read it, definately did not belong in the children’s section).

More recently, this serendipitous selection habbit has led me to books such as “Prodigal Summer” by Barbara Kingslover, “The Mermaid Chair” by Sue Monk Kidd, “Blessed are the Cheesemakers” by Sarah-Kate Lynch (a title I couldn’t resist) and “Down the Rabbit Hole” by Peter Abrahams (a mystery, which I found in the adult section of the library, though it may have belonged in the children’s section, but could work in both, I think).  

There’s something magical about feeling the call of a previously unkown book, or discovering the perfect book by pure chance.

Today, I walked into Chapters, killing time between a dentist appointment and catching the bus home, and not intending to buy anything. I wandered idly down the middle of the store and into the children’s section, turned around, and there was a bright orange and red picture book: “The Company of Crows” by Marilyn Singer. Poems celebrating crows and gorgeous illustrations (by Linda Saport) full of crows! I hadn’t even known the book existed. Of course, I had to buy it.

The cover and the first inside illustration also reminded me of the haiku my friend Jean-Pierre recently added to the comments of my November “Call of the Wild” post:

Eyes are everywhere
Peering through the leaves and branches
In the rookery

I wasn’t sure if I should post this one, but here’s a haiku on how I came upon the first snow drops last year:

snowdrops in the grass

if not for scooping dog poop

would have gone unseen

(I like the way life can surprise us with beauty even in the most mundane and unpleasant moments — and throw those moments into new light.)

Note: I just realized this haiku sounds very similar to the raven haiku of a few posts ago. So much for originality (I guess it’s a repeating pattern in my life: constantly being surprised by the unexpected within the ordinary and marvelling at how easy it would have been to miss). . . . Did that make any sense?

picking up garbage

in my yard, I discover

first blooming snow drops

We were socked in by fog almost all day yesterday. It was so thick during my daughter’s soccer game, we could hardly see the opposite end of the field (couldn’t at all when we first arrived). When we were walking across the parking lot after the game, a raven flew over, trailed by several cawing crows.

Lying awake in bed last night (I always have a hard time falling asleep Sunday nights), I had to jump up and jot down this haiku:

raven in the fog

if not for the noisy crows

might have passed unseen

CBC radio is having a contest right now, calling for poetry, short stories and songs about ravens, so it seems timely to have had a visit from a raven. Now, what to submit?

Some women dislike birthdays. I am not one of these. In fact, although my birthday is today, I have been celebrating it the whole month of January. Yesterday I went out for lunch with friends and was greeted by this haiku chalked onto a sign hanging in front of the Naam restaurant (in Vancouver’s east side).

This morning I opened this present (below right) sent from my friend Jean-Pierre in Japan:

In keeping with the lucky cat theme, I thought I’d also share a couple photos and comments sent to me by people responding to my Quest for the Lucky Cat post. From Jodi at floatingclouds.wordpress.com in the U.S., here is a photo of Kiki, “a rescued feral calico cat and my lucky cat…which she promptly knocked off the shelf and broke as soon as I brought it home from SF Chinatown. I had to glue it all back together. How lucky is that?”

The rather spooky looking black cat at the bottom of this post is a giant Maneki-neko Jean-Pierre found in an antique store in Japan.

Craftygreenpoet.blogspot.com author, Juliet, also shared a comment about the lucky cat in her flat in Edinburgh Scotland. Lucky cats around the globe!

Making connections with people is one of the things I love about blogging.

My dog, Dylan, usually goes to work with my husband, but today my husband went to a meeting and couldn’t take him. So, when I walked my daughter to school, the dog came too. Dylan, a blond Lab-cross adopted from the local animal shelter, knows the streets of our neighbourhood and knows his mind. After saying goodbye to my daughter, I turned to head home, and Dylan turned purposefully in the opposite direction. I gave in.

As we walked, I watched birds and composed haiku (sorry, couldn’t help myself). Dylan, interested only in checking out the various odours along the way, didn’t care at all about the birds (even when a Northern Flicker flew up right in front of his nose).

The dog:

The haiku:

new snow softly falls

black crow glides over white field

— silent watcher

in the middle of snow

crow sits in bare-branched tree

centre of the world

on our snow walk

my dog and I, in two worlds

mine sight, his smell