Poetry Thursday - The Winter Landscape

sun-dazzled blue sky

stubbled hills softened by snow

a bright new landscape

~ Aisling, December 6, 2007

Shifting patterns of cloud keep changing the mood of this day. When the clouds cross the sun, the day is shadowed and one believes easily that more snow is on the way. When the wind moves the clouds away from the sun's bright face, the sky is vibrantly blue and the light glints off the snow that blankets the ground. I see evidence of the slow-turning of the year, as the stalks that supported last summer's wildflowers and the autumn's bountiful seedheads rise, pale and brown, above the snow. I wrote this haiku in one of the sunlit moments of the early afternoon. The photos I've included show both the shadows and the light of early December in these northern hills.

photos by Aisling, December 6, 2007

Poetry Thursday - Tanka

According to ShadowPoetry.com, tanka is "a classic form of Japanese poetry related to the haiku with five unrhymed lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables. (5, 7, 5, 7, 7)" Here is a nice description of "American Tanka." Though I do not see it mentioned in these two websites, one of the things that originally led me to choose this form of poetry for my youngest child, was the mention of the "unexpected." He often does what I least expect!

With those explanations of Tanka in mind, I wrote the following this morning (though I have not included the "unexpected" element as well as I perhaps should have):

The road through autumn
is freckled with falling leaves
scattered by the wind.
One morning, frost gilds the earth
in silver bits of winter.

~ Aisling, September 27, 2007

photo by Aisling, 9/25/07, the garden path