those two or three words

The first dream of the year;

I kept it a secret

and smiled to myself.

Sho-u

winter afternoon-

a crow blackens

the white sky

Forrester

The thief

Left it behind-

The moon in the window.

Roykan

Poetry and prose are loyal friends. Those two or three words affixing to the mind, returning, becoming a part of who we are: how we think, how we see, how we understand.

(Who can forget the image of a little boy using his tongue as a handkerchief! Thank you, Mr. Hugo.)

Yesterday's haiku comes from the opening lines of a poem, "The Caged Skylark", written by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a wonderful study of a poet. Over a decade ago I read passages from his notebooks. It changed the way I observe, the way I think.

Hopkins noted is observations, often coupling them with colors or texture, comparing, looking, listening.

"The lines of the fields, level over level, are striking, like threads in a loom."

"Moonlight hanging or dropping on treetops like blue cobweb."

Stream of consciousness:

"Cups of the eyes, Gathering back the lightly hinged eyelids. Eyelids like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeves, gloves. Also of the bones sleeved in flesh."

penetrating thought, Hopkins!..."bones sleeved in flesh."

Continuously gathering new words - Hopkins collected words!! He had no thesaurus. He studied the people around him, their vocabulary and pronunciation. He would note:

"Mr. Wells calls a grindstone a grindlestone"

"Mr. Coup called a basket a whisket."

"Fr. Casano's pronunciation of Latin instructive. (He is a Sicilian but has spent many years in Spain.) Quod he calls c'od and quae hora becomes almost c'ora -...Fr. Morris gives long u very full (Luca); he emphasises the semi-consonant and vowel before it where two vowels meet"

"Br. Yates gave me the following Irish expressions -"

and this:

"Take a few primroses in a glass and instress of - brilliancy, sort of starriness: I have not the right word"

"I have not the right word" he writes,

a constant thought of my own as I plod on my run:

breathing in winter's sage, it smells like HONEY and milk

(sage smells delicate in the spring, and heavy in the summer's heat).

dappled with tufted shadow

a lovely damasking in the sky

leaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song

finally, for the barefoot runner:

the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

note: Americans are taught haiku is 5-7-5, this however is a simplistic definition of the art form. I won't get into it now, but the poetry of haiku is more than this rigid formula!

the accounting: run 15º, icicles for fingers called it at 5m

60min yoga