Haiku – Sleeping In
The morning sunlight
blissfully tangles itself
In your sleeping hair
nearly transparent
your fingertips lit through
warm orange blown glass
The morning sunlight
blissfully tangles itself
In your sleeping hair
nearly transparent
your fingertips lit through
warm orange blown glass
Frost on the window
Fractures the morning into
Confetti colors
When the world is first frostbitten
tender trees touched in thin ice
When summer shows its back
abandoning you for a faraway land
When winter’s wan face smirks at your peephole
hard fingernails tapping your door
knowing it will soon be strong
enough to crack your lock and let itself in
When everything disintegrates into blue and white and crispy brown
and the wind, mad surgeon, lacerates your summer softened skin
then the clouds part
affording you
one
glimpse
of heavenly light
a welcoming patch in which to stand
When you know you are about to lose it for good
that is when the warmest sun shines
This stemmed from a conversation me and my friends had in a group text.
I am blessed to have the most interesting and creative friends, and our conversations are always something else.
Cowdog Creatives (Hannah) took this picture and sent it to our text group, saying how dramatically it died in the last ray of sunlight.
Another friend said it looked like an Italian opera singer, declaring in song his long-unspoken love to the fair Limoncello with his final breath.
I can’t write opera, but I can write melodramatic sonnets, so I had to join in poking fun at this roach’s dramatic death.
It’s OK to cry.
Fair Lemoncello, golden wings and thighs
No weeping from those scintillating eyes.
I am content that you have heard me speak;
No grief should mar the shine upon that cheek.
What warmth is this that causes my love worry?
A ray of sunlight, yet I cannot scurry.
It lays bare all my tender love for thee.
There is no fear where Lemoncello be.
There’s nothing more to say. My soul is clear.
I cannot stay, my insect queen, to hear
Thy chirped response; angelic though you be
A darker angel draws now near to me.
I do not mind death’s amply lit approach.
Today this nymph developed into roach.
We decided to go swimming.
Last day of summer! Let’s take advantage of this heat, we said.
So we went to the lake.
Nobody was in the water.
It was a cesspool.
Fluffy brown-streaked foam collected at the shore
Four feet wide.
As if the lake was a giant boiling cauldron of broth
But someone had neglected to skim the gathering proteins off the surface.
Or maybe the sand decided to have a shampoo
But passed out from the heat
Before it finished rinsing.
The lap lane ropes
Normally cordoning off the deepest area
Had desperately pulled themselves from their tethers
And morphed from a 50 yard rectangle
Into a pathetic oblong.
Even out deep,
The water was soggily crusted with dead insects, pollen,
And gray mysteries.
We looked at it
While summer’s warmth punched us repeatedly in the back of the head.
We decided to run instead.
We walked
We ran
We sweated.
The sun soldered our clothes to our skin.
The humidity held its slimy palms
Over our noses and mouths
As we miserably carried it
On an endless, sweaty piggyback ride.
Our reward, we decided,
Was an ice cream treat.
It melted so fast
We had to drink the last of it.
Sayonara, summer
You had your last hurrah
And my god
We’re ready for fall now.