9 March 2020 – 16:28 GMT – 10°C Light Rain – Co. Dublin, Ireland
the sound of the bat
flying in the thicket
is dark
A haiku I really like by Masaoka Shiki who in a short TB-curtailed life is credited with rescuing the poetry form of haiku. He urged poets to seek inspiration from the beauty of nature. He advised that we ‘encounter beautiful scenes and copy them realistically.’
In the bright room where I like to read, not just poetry, the rain is gently tapping the window glass.
We’ve a cymbidium orchid blooming there. It set for the first time in the several years since it was gifted to us. While our other phalenopsis orchids have remained in flower for up to six months, I read that two months is the max for cymbidium. Well, it’s two months already. So I guess I’ll be walking towards Rome when the blooms fall.
There are three anthuriums too. Each gifted. Two came from my father, one a housewarming gift, the second marking a return home after two months of house-remodelling during the Sydney olympics. The third came from office colleagues who amusingly sent a penis-plant to me while I was undergoing prostate cancer treatment.
I suppose it’s a shrine of kinds. The cymbidium came by way of greenhouse clearance after the death of my father’s first cousin. An avid green thumb, he loved his hard-to-grow orchids. My father too is dead and he loved plants and designing gardens that never got built. And in the case of the prostate cancer, I’m five years down the road and discharged from care.
Back in 2017, I blogged a haiku from “Thames Way” by Diarmuid Fitzgerald, a book of haiku and tenka inspired by his walk from the Thames Barrier to the head of the river. I was doing sections of the same in preparation for a charity walk.
in the marches
without my map –
joyously lost
Leave a Reply