After a slow start to Wilderness Interface Zone’s Love of Nature Nature of Love Month, we’re opening our LONNOL haiku chain. It’s our hope that readers will join in this winter and post-Valentine’s Day celebration of the logic of the heart harnessed with images of nature’s splendors and subtleties.
A haiku is a classical Japanese poetical form, usually 17 syllables all in a single line in Japanese, but there are longer and shorter forms. In English, haiku often take the form of one short line of 5 syllables, a long line of 7 syllables, and a short line of 5 syllables, but there are many ways–all versions are welcome here.
There’s no deadline for this activity and the only requirement is that you focus your feeling in a nature-oriented haiku. You can link your haiku to an image in a preceding one or simply forge a link out of new images altogether. The chain runs as long as participants carry it along.
Traditionally considered a mindfulness practice, writing haiku brings perception and language together in a splash of imagery and aperçu. Can you distill you deepest feelings and sheerest insights to 17 syllables? Give it a go.
Here is my opening LONNOL haiku:
From plot twists in sea,
shore, savanna, city, this
departure, this love.
Love, depart not from
moments, from the images
imprinted in loving.
LikeLike
.
Imprint me, my love,
with your gentle touch and smell.
Leave me, thy leavings.
LikeLike
Leaving a jet plane
To stay home: tressled flowers,
Bathroom mold
LikeLike
Mold me to you, and
there is room for us both here
in the smallest place.
LikeLike
To the thrill of wild
phlox and garden chive, piling
snow bends drought’s branches
LikeLike
Naked branches drip
Sap expectantly, waiting,
Urging, coaxing green.
LikeLike
Rabbits dart from black
branching shadows, feet crunching
moonlight on the snow.
LikeLike
Moonlight peers through the
Branches, silvering the gaps,
Empty. Unaware.
LikeLike
Unaware you lie
Breath like a serpent in and out
In the night’s glare
LikeLike
Sudden early spring
quiets night’s shrill snowlight, warms
some touch in the breeze.
LikeLike