irish haiku

Burning leaves . . .
the face once again
feels summer






                Juanita Casey


















...

noblesse sauvage

  














     METIS                                     








Speak the Great Names:  Fort Qu'Appelle
St Isidore de Bellevue, Grand Coteau,

Batoche, Fort Walsh, Frog Lake and Cut Knife Hill,

Seven Oaks and the rest of Rupert's land

and say what lies there between: bones

the wind gives back, bones of buffalo, bones

of the hunters bones of Blackfeet,  Cree and Blood

the prairie piled white with hunts, all

bone brothers under sun. Name

me,  Gabriel king of this bare kingdom

of bones, riding and riding through white remains.

Name me, Gabriel, hero of the Wild

West of Buffalo Bill, hero of the great

Staten Island shoot out,  me and Le

Petit killers of little blue balls

riding and riding through pictures of sage brush and sky,

fighting with clocks beneath the electric sun,

never as we used to fight, waiting,

talking, never arriving though miles and miles

of coulee and plain .  And now where the prairie was

Sitting Bull and I and faces in the dark

square off, Chief of the great Hunkpapa Lakota,

dazed in the painted flats, and I, calling,

calling: God, will they find us, lost in faces,

before we stop forever, smiling in a glass

cage, where rivers stop, and birds hang

on the sky never moving? My smile is glass.

Everything lies inside me: buffalo run

to ground, streets I never saw where the elms

line faces singing white, singing

"The Stars and the Stripes Forever"  waiting for wars

and other shows at the town's end. They see

me, Gabriel, and see a war that hardly

was, a circus war so put off we almost

missed the last call. Dummies I gave

them to save my friends, men stuffed like the great

chief and I who drift slowly through places

and then through names where hundreds walk to gaze

and conjure us. Speak the names -- me, Gabriel,

a clock ticking to an abandoned house.




                                       E.D. Blodgett

.....

everything finds its own order

  In the Slant Light                               

On a grassy bank under a willow tree
I fell asleep pillowed in an elbow of summer,
and woke to see snow falling.
It is too late now for many things,
too late for so many things. 

 The sun barely skirts the treetops
before beginning its downward arc.
Across the still air, sporadic hammer-sounds
ring out, metal on metal—men on scaffolds,
men on ladders in the slant light,
battening down the hatches for winter.


What happened to noon, high noon?
There used to be noon.
Time is evaporating like a tide pool,
leaving its stranded flotsam, a cipher
scribbled across the sand. Debris
of our days—we had better look to it. 

 What to discard, and what pass on?
What yet to hoard to keep us warm?
Something to dig around in.
Something to chew on.
As the future shrinks, the past
looms larger, the past
is compost, is pemmican.






                                  Robyn Sarah
















...

hunger in the tailings

OLD BUTTE RAT                                    





I will not end up like the beggar
with the sign that reads "Need Food," even though,
of course, honesty may be everything.


I think that a philosopher should have something to talk about,
a writer something to write about.  I have never been able to
do more than declare I was a chip on the foamy river,
and on the chip.  "Hey, I say, "I'm still afloat."


Rumi wrote, "Beyond ideas of wrong doing,
beyond ideas of right doing,
there is a field.  I'll meet you there."


I wonder who might bring bread?  That's what I wonder.
Why a field?  I'll meet you in the alley
I say.  Of course, I am from Butte,
not Silky Persia or Smooth Move America.


Still.  It is the Indian Paint Brush flowers
and Bear Grass that get to me, as I fork through the sausage
of current affairs, remembering the sacred little mining
operations of the past.


It is also the sky without contrail.
To gaze at the heavens now is to peer through
a shattered windshield,
cracked up by lawless noisy aircraft.


Occasionally, I catch a glimpse of blue...





--Ed Lahey




















...

tide tempest and trial

TEN MONTHS AFTER THE DIVORCE   










It is a cave
we can only see at low-tide,


the moss drifting
like the hair
of drowned mermaids,


the sea-stars
clinging futilely
to the rocks.




               


                 Alan L. Birkelbach


















......

LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, 
in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. 
Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.



                                   Derek  Walcott










....