Weighers of Souls

libellule lullabies, 

lilting flight of dragonflies - 

on a lily’s bell alight 

 -Graham Brown

Fantin Latour's Tablecloth

Fantin Latour's tablecloth -

the world has turned turquoise

after seeing it

The Night Wind

Where does it come from?

Where is it going?

The Night Wind

Synchronicities

synchronicities

coming in threes

- cracks in reality

like biting timber
like biting an Amazon
- biting Brazil nuts.

A twirling leaf

- from which to which world

does it fall?

I cleansed the mirror
of my heart… now it reflects
the moon.

Renseki, 1789

May the rain green valley

be a bowl 

that overflows with you

distant islands -
palmed, hidden,
as if in magicians' fists

the suburbs 
turn purple
- jacarandas

Here among the thirty thousand days 

of a long life, 

a single day stands still.
-Donald Hall

Senryu

Like dew drops
on a lotus leaf
I vanish.
-Senryu, 1826

Ryokan

This world
a fading mountain echo
void and unreal.
-Ryokan

Borges

Is there or not
the dream I forgot
before dawn.
- Jorge Luis Borges

Buson

one line of wild geese -
stamps the moon
on the mountain’s edge
- Buson

What makes good art

Talent’s just an instrument. It’s like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn’t. I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn’t sound hip at all.

- David Foster Wallace

Togyo

When autumn winds blow
not one leaf remains
the way it was.
- Togyo

Yosa Buson

Coolness,
the sound of the bell,
as it leaves the bell.

Besieged without warning.
I surrender without a fight
- rain in the deep of night

Kerouac

Bach through an open
dawn window —
the birds are silent

Jack Kerouac, “Book of Haikus”

The frog's call sounds like
hard river stones struck together
in the soft water.

Alarm going off somewhere.
What world have I broken into,
at this ungodly hour?

Basho

Winter solitude—
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.

-Basho

Chosu

Broken and broken
again on the sea,
the moon so easily mends

—Chosu

The Two Cosmoses

Everything that is out there is also within. One might say there is a cosmos without and a cosmos within. In the haiku moment they are drawn together as one, each and every time. And, over time, the distinction becomes less and less. What a great gift is this grace we call haiku. Do accept it.

-Gabriel Rosenstock, Haiku: The Gentle Art of Disappearing.

A stone will be born
from utter fragility
- peach blossom

Pure white lotuses
on the lake of remoteness
- clouds are cool inside

Snow flakes falling, flake by flake
Each flake falls
in its proper place.

-Zen haiku

Ryokan

What is the heart of this old monk like?
A gentle wind
Beneath the vast sky.

-Ryokan

A revelation!
the bush's hidden heart -
sudden headlights.

Though quick to wither,
you exude Eternity -
gardenia bloom.

Over the mown oval,
vacant in the midday haze,
a breeze blows unnoticed.

Dark green inferno
turning the past to ashes -
the conifer tree

A palm frond thatched hut.
The sea wind in its fringed eaves
brings an inner ease.

blood-coloured tide -
summer rains have dyed the waves
with the iron cliff's oxides

Veiled in Summer's haze,
immortal as Mount Meru
- towering clouds.

Upon experiencing Self-realisation Wumen wrote the following enlightenment poem:

A thunderclap under the clear blue sky

All beings on earth open their eyes;

Everything under heaven bows together;

Mount Sumeru leaps up and dances.

Mount Sumeru is the central world mountain in Buddhism. This central axis is reflected in a human being as the Shushumna channel in the spine. The Kundalini energy leaps up the spine and dances on the crown of the head during Self-realisation.

A kookaburra
on a turning clothes hoist -
I miss it vanish

Branches in earth
and roots in the quiet sky -
buds are opening

Crowned with fresh needles,
surpassing me in silence -
The great pine's stature.