Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. Jules Renard
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I find it interesting to find new sources of information and/or entertainment. A few days ago a good one came my way. I subscribe to Curtis Dunlap’s blog called Blogging Along Tobacco Road. It is dedicated to publishing the three-line haiku or the five-line tanka styles of poetry. When the e-mail alert came across my screen that a new posting was available I clicked on his site - tobaccoroadpoet.blogspot.com - and watched a video tribute - “For Mike” - he had placed for Mike Farley, a Red Lodge, Montana rancher and haiku poet who had recently passed away. There, Dunlap stood by a river in North Carolina and recited Farley’s haiku:
Jack Daniels
just a splash
at the river’s edge
Of course, he pulled a half-pint of whisky and a shot glass from his pocket and poured himself a “splash.” Check it out. As flippant as this might seem with my description of the scene, it was done very respectfully, and I can only hope I’m celebrated that way some day.
I’ve been writing some of the haiku and tanka forms lately. Here are a few -
blank pages -
writing all those years
without ink in my pen
target practice -
the bull’s eye sighted me
clawing up a tree
a blanket of fog
on the horizon -
an old man telling stories
the morning sun
rises on veiled buttes
spreading its light
with the wings
of soaring hawks
due south
Little Heart Butte
pokes from the surface
a lump on the skin
prominent yet benign
