hai’ku – Page 14 – don't confuse the narrator

of love and toothbrushes

in the glass beside the sink
my toothbrush
kisses yours

Having come across the above snippet in an old notebook, I was reminded of a definition of true love.

I couldn’t quite remember it, though, and it’s taken me nearly an hour to track it down; it wasn’t Shaw, as I had thought, but Somerset Maugham, in The Constant Wife.

Maugham’s works are presumably still in copyright, so not so easy to find on-line, and although I have the complete short stories and a couple of novels, I don’t have the plays. Finally, though, I have found the piece I was looking for.
Continue reading “of love and toothbrushes”

images

There are times I can see the appeal of Twitter for a writer, particularly for poets. I often ‘find’ an image that I know will probably one day find its way into a poem, but that I don’t have time to think through and connect to other things right away.

So, in 140 characters – or less, to make it easily re-tweetable – I could capture that image in a kind of tweet’ku.

There again, I already spend enough time updating the blog, so perhaps I’m better off posting such things here, particularly as I can include the photo directly. Like this:

Cob nuts in mob caps

dry’ku III

Ragged leaf veils
geometrical precision:
butterfly eggs.

In case anyone cares what sort of leaf it is, it’s a kiwi leaf, and the ones above are grape vines. And there is, indeed, something odd about the chaotic tumble of vines juxtaposed with the tiny perfect arrangement of insect eggs.

june

The sun slopes down into a summer evening
and hulking mountains strive to shed
the last rags of snow.

Sadly, the light has been all wrong the last few evenings to take a better picture, but the snow is still clearly visible in this one that I took one morning last week. There’ve been a lot fewer clouds for the last couple of days- it was positively hot outside at 9am today – and, although there are still a few shreds of white up on the peaks, I don’t think they’ll last many more days.