673 - Gerard Manley Hopkins Quote

She caught the crying of those Three,
The Immortals of the eternal ring,
The Utterer, Uttered, Uttering.
(from his poem, Margaret Clitheroe)

681 - Long time

no post. Here's a haiku:

Now, Whitley's dome, a
Cake-iced white, or plaster cast,
Sweetly heals within.

689 - After Faith

[Work in progress]

That I am an extraneous man
Is (is it?) no doubt. That you
And I have met, on the intersection of
Love and doubt, is
Our hopeful declaration of marriage:
We will, I'm sure, make it work.

But in my thought sphere (my world) I
See two trajectories: I am
Falling away from myself,
Falling together. One two - Outside
The cradle in which all is borne,
Sinking centripetally; or, in the cradle,
The cuckoo, becoming legal,
Only by correctives
Applied by in- or external hand.

Caught in the fall upstream, in
The bounds of this flesh, perhaps
You enkeep me, as I try to keep you:
Necessity nest me, and I will
Garland you in my superfluous words.
(Morning I chase them away;
Evening I welcome them back.)

I say instead: life, be our guard;
Evolution our holding cell; church our
Sentence, a palindrome. Restitution, fly
In dissipating threads, quickened
By black holes. But in this instance, if only this,
Be love.

700 - Haiku! (Bless you.)

This night I last the
Longitudes round, zero to
Zero, northern lit.

727 - Iron Man

What? It's a piece of corroded metal I found on Whitley Bay beach. It's a tribute to Ted Hughes. It's art.

746 - Haiku, Better?

Reading about the Haiku format, I came across this quote: "Basho [a Japanese haiku master] said that each haiku should be a thousand times on the tongue."

Yesterday's haiku tries to convey a flow of time - winter into spring - with the sense that it is a cycle that repeats, but on the first line a strong image - city - perhaps overweighs the rest of the poem. Centrally, I was hoping to convey the idea that civilisation is no more or less than a fall of snow, despite its initial sparkle and subsequent seeming permanence. But traditional haiku are about emotional states, not concepts.

By returning again to the haiku, in the spirit of Basho, and rearranging it, so that the city occupies the last thought, I lose the sense of time-flow, of state change, but correct the imbalance... oh, I don't know! what do you think?

wake my tongue, to numb
and cease me, melting away -
fall soft my city -

747 - Winter Haiku

fall soft my city,
wake my tongue, to numb and cease
me, melting away.