IN THE NAME OF LOVE

IN THE NAME OF LOVE

Inspired by titillating and tragic news headlines some time ago, I wrote the first two related tanka and posted them in the Summer Haiku Blog, a world-wide community of poets with the common love of the Japanese poetic forms. Then I added the third and fourth ones  later after a similar headliner.

she gunned him
in his sleep
as she can’t bear 
to share her lover
then she killed herself

mystery solved
he disappeared
only to admit later
he’s with his other love
living abroad 

their vow of love
remains unbroken
to the very end
when both submitted
to euthanasia

she with terminal cancer
he with hale heart who chose
to die with her together
in a foreign hospital
sanctioning self immolation

While having dessert in a restaurant after a late lunch, I wrote these lines on the back of the sales receipt, fresh from the memory of the poems I wrote above. 

Being a wordsmith that I am, my poetic persona meandered to a familiar magical and homey place where the past and the present mesh and time stands still. With just a bit of remembered lives or events, an avalanche of words spews out from nowhere and weaves themselves into a poem, like this one. 

the entwined ivy
and blooming rose
reach for the sun
the entanglements
of forbidden love

REMEMBERING 9/11

REMEMBERING 9/11

A haiku sequence

simple math

six hijackers

to six thousand dead

innocence crumbles

among New York rubble

September rain

patriotic fervor

the geraniums

remain in bloom

blood-stained sun

sinks in the rubble

twilight of hopes

the Vietnam vet buys

red, white and blue tulips

memorial garden

In my book, Rustle of bamboo leaves

but first published in

World Haiku Review

Vol. 1, Issue 3, November 2001