“It is life’s work to recognize the mystery of the obvious”
– Jim Harrison (Day Twenty-Seven – 28 Days of Unreason)
Honeycrisp apple –
Wife offers sweet mystery,
Temps me with a bite
Category: Jilly
Haiku – Watershed
“The river can’t heal everything”
– Jim Harrison (Day Twenty-Five – 28 Days of Unreason)
Lips as split as sky –
The headwaters of mercy –
Rain on Golgotha
Haiku – Open Water
“Nature has portals, rather than doors”
– Jim Harrison (Day Twenty-Four– 28 Days of Unreason)
Kelp, brack, salt and mud
Moon pulls blanket from the bed –
Smell slams angry door
Haiku – Fresh Start
"Nature detonates your mind with the incalculable freshness of the new day"
– Jim Harrison (Day Twenty-Two – 28 Days of Unreason)
Nature calls; frogs splash
Old pond scents familiar –
Dog is relieved
Haiku – Forest Stills
"Like many poets I’m part blackbird and part red squirrel and my brain chatters, shrieks, and whistles."
– Jim Harrison (Day Twenty-One – 28 Days of Unreason)
Quiet sensing wind
.22 Longs for season –
Waiting for the fall
Haiku – Mixology
"Words are moving water, muddy, clear, or both"
– Jim Harrison (Day Twenty – 28 Days of Unreason)
Gin-clear morning light
Feels like dirty martini
Drunk with cloudy dreams
Prelude
“The birds are a chorus…clearly relatives of Mozart”
– Jim Harrison (Day Nineteen – 28 Days of Unreason)
Bird, box, grave –
Mozart gave a funeral
For his starling*.
I may want more
For my Requiem,
But my Day of Judgment seems
Here, now, along this road,
Dies irea of dirt and sand.
A flock of birds
Unsung across the wires,
Wary of my approach
As any St. Peter.
And startled, rise as one
When across the moor
A nail gun taps out Kyrie
To closing wood.
Haiku – Snow Buddha
“We were born to be moving water not ice”
– Jim Harrison (Day Eighteen – 28 Days of Unreason)
Nanook says we must
Chop ice, carry water –
Zen of the igloo
Life Jacket
“Saw a poem float by just beneath the surface”
– Jim Harrison (Day Seventeen – 28 Days of Unreason)
Poems like water wings
Flotation devices
Strapped around our arms
Our chests our necks
Their gallows promise of not drowning
Holding on at/above/just under
The surface coughing out love
Hoping to breathe like the air itself
Our hearts sharked and slippery
Then slipping over onto our backs
Floating forever
Gulls floating forever
Overhead like forever
Sunburned onto our faces
Drunken and dunked in our
Breathtakingly cool skin and
Hoping we will
Live forever.
Haiku – Weir
“We walk the bottom of an ocean we call sky”
– Jim Harrison (Day Sixteen – 28 Days of Unreason)
Light’s flash up and down
Waterfall tumbles rainbows
Dizzy, flustered fish
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