poem: their journey withered

heron’s cry –
in the falling darkness
two blossoms

autumn thunder, evening
a branch trembles
as crow goes wandering
the petals alight
on mountain snow

heat-faded remains of daffodils,
their journey withered
in inches

Snow comes early in the mountains, but dried flower petals retain the memory of summer’s heat. And everything has its own journey to make, whether long or short.

I linked this poem to the readwritepoem blog, where there is a weekly poetry “prompt” inviting people to submit poems on a new theme each week. This week’s theme was giving up control, writing a poem by pulling randomly from a bag of words that had been cut up from a different source — another poem, a newspaper article, or even a memo from the boss at work :-).

I randomly selected words from some of my favorite haiku from Basho. Here they are as I pulled them from the bag (highlighting the phrases that I used for my poem):

heron’s cry falling darkness two blossoms field echo lightning above nightfall temple autumn thunder evening branch trembles wandering goes crow petal alights mountain snow leaves shimmering heat faded remain daffodils journey withered inches dead silence one into perfect fragrant enough waterfall’s rose barely dried bells sick first bend dream grass stabs

Then all I did was add some line breaks and a few tweaks for grammar. If you are going to try to make a poem from words pulled from a bag, you could do worse than starting with Basho’s words!

(You can read other poets’ submissions on the theme at the readwritepoem blog too.)

in russia, birthday wishes you!

My brother Tom sent me a card for my birthday recently. Well, I presumed that it was a birthday card but it was all in Russian so for all I knew it was a lost set of nuclear launch codes from Siberia!

Когда ты улыбаешься,
Становится светлей,
Когда ты появляешься,
Всем сразу веселей!

И просто замечательно,
Что есть на свете ты,
Пускай же обязательно
Исполнятся мечты!

I did take two years of Russian during my misspent college career which sadly has almost entirely rusted away from disuse. Still, I love the sound of spoken Russian and I can still phonetically sound out the words (if you want to try this at home, put some marbles in your mouth to be truly authentic!) :

Cogda tee oolibyeshsya, stanovitsa svetlei,
Cogda tee payavlyaeshsya, fsyem srazoo veselei!

Ee prosto zamechatyelna, shto est na sveteh tee,
Pooskai zhe obyazatyelna eespalyatsya metchtee!

With the help of Wikipedia’s Russian alphabet page I manually copied, letter by letter, the words from the paper card into a text file. Then I tried Google’s online automatic translator:

When you smile, becomes brighten.
When you appear, all at once is more cheerful!
Also it is simply wonderful, that there is on light you.
Start up dreams will necessarily be executed!

So, not Russian launch codes after all :-).  The last line would be more poetically translated as “May all your dreams come true!”, but there is a certain Russian-ness to the way the automatic translator rendered it.

Tom, may all your dreams be necessarily executed too!

Update (2009-10-29) Thanks to commenter Natalia, I finally have a faithful translation, which is nicer and more lovely than Google’s machine translation:

When you smile, everything becomes brighter.
When you appear, everyone is more cheerful!
Also it is simply wonderful, that you exist in this world!
And may all your wishes absolutely become true!!!

pomp and circumstance and pomp

It’s been a busy spring for getting back to the midwest for family events. Most recently, we flew to Missouri for Nancy’s niece Shelby’s graduation.

After the ceremony and big dinner, Shelby went off for the seniors’ overnight event at the school. Grandma Neva, proud papa Robert, Nancy, I, plus Aaron and his girlfriend Amanda settled into the hotel’s lounge for a friendly poker game. Amanda turned out to be a pretty cool card sharp, so it’s a good thing we weren’t playing for money or Nancy and I might not have been able to get back home! :-)

Last month Nancy and I flew back to Iowa for my family’s big event. My family sure do love a party, so this was a combination 50th anniversary for my folks, pre-graduation celebration for niece Margie, and birthday party for niece Hannah! As you can see, we were all on our best behavior :-)

A quick look through the wayback machine at Ma ‘n’ Pa:

neighbor of the week

Not far from our house is a steep hillside, and of course some people like to build houses on them. One such house stabilizes their slope with very large rocks. (For scale, these rocks are probably a foot or two across.)

There is what looks like a kind of pressure-release pipe near the bottom of the slope, with a styrofoam cap duct-taped on. Some wise guy (not me! :-) added a few extra touches for a stylish look.

Bonus neighbor-of-the-week:

japanese garden

Visiting Portland’s Japanese Garden with Bo & Amber and Chris.

(For our earlier visits to the Japanese Garden, see this post and this one too.)