eco-tourism

By Debbie Strange
Canada

Failed Haiku Journal of English Senryū, Volume 4, Issue 39, March 2019

derecho

By Debbie Strange
Canada

Prune Juice (cover), Issue 38, December 2022

BEACHED

By Regina (Gina) Piroska
Tasmania, Australia

Heat hangs, torrid, pressing upon tired shoulders.

Touched by the occasional warm starfish an ancient, patchy, bird-shit monument kneels in puddled sand beneath a sky stitched to the sea.

below blue
sails billow
over blue

Ripples circle the rock where, in the tide’s cloud-crawl, tiny crabs get on with their crabby lives and I wonder how words can convey this sense without images to the eye.

On this slow, tedious, amplified afternoon, I lean against the colossus baffled by the clamour of these idiot gulls, ignorant in the art of give and take, because it’s perfectly clear who should yield.

crushed
shell in a footprint
empty beach

First Published in Drifting Sands Haibun, January 2022
~ Adelaide B Shaw guest editor.

Dining Out . . . 

By: Anna Cates, Wilmington, Ohio
and Steve Van Allen, Cincinnati, Ohio

even on gray days
the sun fights to silver sheen
beyond cloud cover

We held the door for a lady, dragging two wheeled suitcases, balancing a shopping bag on one. Her long black coat was nice, years ago. She parked her bags inside the door and shuffled to the counter.  “I have 4 dollars,” dragging wrinkled ones from a pocket.

“Keep your money; I’ll cover it,” said the manager.

We took our order and began eating. When the manager swung by our booth, we thanked her.

“I’m from Louisiana.  I was homeless, and an addict.  I know,” she said.

The lady talked to her meal as she ate, and when she was through, wheeled all her worldly goods out the door.

first snow
disappearing with her
silent dreams

Incantations

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, NC, USA

forests
burning far away
I bow
to the wood thrush
singing orisons unseen

I follow a path along the brook, through mountain laurel and rhododendron. The stone hut stands half-hidden among the trees, its roof green with moss. Thick, curved walls enclose an oval of coolness in the summer heat. Elliptical windows admit a little light.  As my eyes adjust, I notice a message chalked on the sloping ceiling:

maybe 
the world isn’t dying . . . 
maybe 
she’s heavy 
with child

*Note: The second tanka is a ‘found poem.’
~From my book Earthbound: Tanka-Prose & Haibun, 2022

Just This

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, NC, USA

I used to think
it would last forever—
the swallows
coming home each year,
the green hills blossoming

on my path
one pure white feather
I carry with me
news of a dying planet,
a widening war

the bridge
across the creek—
I cannot see
the barred owl 
calling from the other side

a water strider
dimples the surface,
an otter 
rises and vanishes . . .
the stream flows on

spring beauties bloom
among tiny handprints
in the mud
I kneel on the bank
of the passing moment

~First published as the Afterword to A Worn Chest by Joy McCall & Tom Clausen, 2022

  Reprinted in my book The Wind Harp: Tanka Pentads, 2023

The Least of These

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, NC, USA

Hokusai painted them, Issa wrote about them, and Mao did his best to exterminate them. 

It’s true that Eurasian tree sparrows gorge themselves on spilled grain.  So, during the Great Leap Forward, the Four Pests Campaign encouraged schoolchildren to kill as many sparrows as they could, tearing up nests and smashing eggs. People beat pots and gongs to drive them from their roosts until the birds dropped from exhaustion.  A billion sparrows died. With few birds left to eat them, hungry locusts swarmed through grain fields and rice paddies. Upwards of forty million people starved. 

gazing 
into Pandora’s box—
nothing left
but a tattered feather
and a mirror full of cracks

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign

Back to School

By Carissa Coane
California, United States of America

back-to-school shopping —
does this backpack
come in bulletproof?

Murky Lake

By Theresa Cancro
Wilmington, Delaware, USA

murky lake . . .
long tears cloud
the buffalo’s eye

Pachamama

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA

Long ago, in a sacred valley where Inca kings and mountain glaciers reigned, there was a garden made of gold. A golden tree with silver leaves that danced and glittered in the breeze. Golden beasts and birds and flowers from across the empire. Stalks of maize with golden kernels. A jaguar from the Amazon, golden eyes gazing at the llamas and alpacas with their fine golden fleece. And all around, the walls of the Coricancha covered in sheets of gold, glowing in the sun. 

Spanish conquistadors blundered into the garden, eyes alight with greed. Some made passing mention of its wonders in the chronicles they wrote, but no one took the time to draw pictures of the shining icons, nor even make a list of what was there. They gathered up the precious metal and melted it all down.

black gold
burning in our furnaces—
the ice caps
melting into streams
like crystal tears

The Intruder

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA

A glimpse of white wing bars, half hidden among juniper and honeysuckle. Uncertain, I find a picture on my phone and the app plays several notes of a song. At once a tiny being—no more than a quarter of an ounce—confronts me, scolding loudly, warning me away from a world that belongs to him. 

sunlit hedgerow—
the kinglet reveals
his ruby crown

All of Us

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA

all of us
from blowfly to blue whale
birthright citizens
of a dying planet . . .
who will have the last word?

Gas lit

By Melissa Dennison
Bradford, Yorkshire, England

From boreal forests in the Arctic Circle to Hawaii and Malibu, every year more and more of our planet is burning.

fanning the flames
deniers of
climate change

Fewer Butterflies

By Florence Heyhoe
County Down, Northern Ireland

fewer butterflies—
places at the table
emptied by war