Oriental Plane 

By Diana Webb
Leatherhead, Surrey, UK

It towers above the park this tree . An ancient haven with countless generations of birds to its name.  It teems with wildlife down through its roots.

Painters have painted it, poets penned poems on it, children danced and sang round the girth of its trunk. 

Now there are plans for this space with a landmark. High rise tower blocks. Multi-story car park. Big hotel. Lots and lots and lots of concrete which will always resound with the multi-wave echo of the crash of a tree. 

layered picnic rug
with shade of myriad summers
we shake out the tears

As Einstein would say 

By Diana Webb
Leatherhead, Surrey, UK

She is walking back from the supermarket, bag weighed down by difficult choices, when in the day’s last rays she sees it.

empty snail shell 
caked with soil 
the relic 

Some go to great pains, she recalls, to stop these small land gastropods from underfoot death, by moving them away from pedestrian paths. This one exited naturally, protective architecture unshattered.

tick in the box
between her fingertips 
a miracle 

The creature left its home for her to contemplate under the roof of her own small home on the patch they shared in their mutual home planet earth. 

silver trace 
one gleam of ink at the tip 
of the spiral 

From a Sphere

By Diana Webb
Leatherhead, Surrey, UK

Sylvie is doing her English homework.  She skims through ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by the poet John Keats and reads the final line aloud, ” ‘ Fled is that music – Do I wake or sleep?’ ” She reads it again and again. She loves the poet’s voice and writes a haiku:

echoes 
just echoes 
notes from a dream 

Her mother tells her the writer from the Romantic movement stayed for a few days near their home, just over a hundred years ago.  While there, he wrote in a letter that he could take part in the existence of a bird and asserted, ‘nothing startles me beyond the Moment’.

“I’ll never hear that bird for a moment “says her fourteen-year-old daughter. “Our teacher says it may soon be extinct. So perhaps the poet was psychic when he wrote those lines and especially this one, ‘No hungry generations tread thee down'”

She takes a deep breath and writes another haiku. 

marching for greed
in dust underfoot
music of stardust

For Breath

I thank you God. 

For even one to disadvantage others,
please forgive me, God. 

With every one I praise you immanent in all creation, God.

For all who wish to animate our planet well, i ask your help oh God,
And that includes myself.

flit of a bird 
through morning prayers.
a sigh of wings 

Diana Web – Leatherhead, Surrey, UK