when we want to live
a life more lit and touched with
fire we need the beach
*
where sea throws us waves,
thoughts singed with feels we can’t share
like words lost in storm
*
light snow drifts on dunes
while wind blows cold and dry, we
walk down to the shore—
*
foam flies from the waves
like smoke, rolls on soft wet sand,
the dog sniffs, bites it;
*
sunlight’s lying on the beach–
wet, shining now the ash-curled waves sink
reflecting sky:
*
clouds of flame and ash
float through blue, hidden heaven
soaking into earth
*
sky, flames, snow and wind, waves, foam and sand,
they and all of it are never still not ever but they move us
through us as we walk, wish, stand–
*
what I see, I write,
and with my words I try to
catch the snow and light
*
**
*
Photos by F. Oomkens
Atmospheric, suggestive haiku, whose stark-seeming simplicity and monosyllabic austerity conceals, as so often, cunningly camouflaged complexity.
The haiku are loaded, full, pushing at the confines of the form!
In these winter months, flames of passion and tender care don’t burn as high as we might like, but words such as these, gently observant, with no agenda, can inspire us to find joyful shared solace in nature and our surroundings and turn us on to consummation in each other’s arms.
A brushstroke of self-reflection we rarely see in your poems!
The poem shifts and moves through from simple, literal description to a kind of artist’s credo.
It’s about energy and its flow. It’s both a summary of Ommnian deeds and a statement of intent.
The opening and closing verses are monosyllabically worded, 17-syllable haiku, and they wrap or sandwich the more expansive verses between them. Those three “contained” verses break out of the haiku form like the moving energy their words depict, scarcely containing their sense. The final haiku (the artist’s credo as James Wood calls it above) reverts to the simple-seeming monosyllabic haiku form about words trying to catch the snow and light. This is a balanced poem about the impossibility of balancing observation, reality, description, a wondrous expression and evocation of what poetry can do.
How very apt that a poem about movement is called a “work in progress”
I wonder whether trying to catch snow and light in words, as you profess, is truly your aim in writing