Verse

I've disappointed?

You expected more, perhaps a rhyming poem?

Yes, I could write one for you. Yes, I do see.

You'd prefer that to this rambling, free association style.

This form is so unstructured…a priori.


Just as I was born reading, as soon as Grandmother Fullwood taught me the alphabet song and put a pencil into my hand, I wrote verse. I began with blessings for the table, couplets about the grass and flowers, or nonsensical riddle/rhymes. In grammar school, I presented the fifth grade play, that I had been chosen to write, in verse! Mrs. Work gave me an extra week to “prose it up; fix it.”

A child before after-school-care and day-camps, I spent a part of every summer with my cousin Dixie. We passed the time following our afternoon baths reading parts in Shakespeare’s plays aloud. I fiddled away one whole month of summer, once, writing sonnets because I grew so tired of acting. (“How, now, Gertrude?”)

Since all pre-teen-aged kids tend to get despondent, I practiced elegies, dirges, odes, and all that in Junior High School. Later, at New Hanover High, I won scholarships and contests with my free verse and my “beat generation” style.

To this day, poetry still falls out of my head unbidden and I almost never write it down.

I’m not much of a fan of most religious poetry, although I miss the words of the old Baptist hymns sometimes. Otherwise, the spiritual poet seems to be trying too hard with verse after verse of pretty, rhyming, supplicating, thanking, self-doubting, or glorifying words. One cannot beat the Psalms. What more (along with the lovely old acappella spirituals) do I need?

I won't rule out one day writing libretto for newly created church music, however, which is a different genre. But lately…

Lately, in the past half-dozen years or so, I've been practicing haiku. I believe that I have found my perfect medium of expression.

The shortest and most compact poetic form, the haiku has numerous styles, each with its own rules. I practice dozens of these and sometimes write prose in sentence form but haiku style. The reader seldom notices.

My own form of haiku is to write about a snapshot that I have just taken or a scene that I'm about to photograph. When viewed together, I call this style Images With and Without a Camera. I've been collecting these for awhile. Perhaps they can be gathered into a Haiku book one day. Or not.

When the images go stale, there is no use to keep them except for the occasional art display or because one of them tugs at my heart a little. I used to publish them on the old blog and also on Twitter and facebook.

To me, the photographic image and its haiku should be enjoyed as quickly in the moment as possible. This means right now, this season, this year, less than an hour ago, not more than a week ago. Then the form becomes an Image with a capital I.

You'll be seeing more of my Images…as we go along here. I might explain where and when I took the picture and what type of haiku I am using. That would be fun and the work would be more pertinent set in the proper time-frame – for a blog is a chronological record, if nothing else. A techno-diary/journal.

Occasionally, I group/frame/display some the haiku together to make a larger statement. One of these, framed in real life, is also pictured on the Holy Comforter Spirit and Creativity Guild web page. I call it simply Seasons. If I group others in that way, down the road, I’ll publish them there (web address to be announced) as well.

So, no. No verse today. If anything really stirs my imagination enough to sit down and write it out, I'll print the poem here. Promise. Otherwise, haiku it is!