earthshine
HAIKU BY CHUCK BRICKLEY
earthshine
HAIKU BY CHUCK BRICKLEY
Every haiku I write is an answer to the question:
"What's an existentialist like you doing in a church like this?"
- cb
Every haiku I write is an answer to the question:
"What's an existentialist like you doing in a church like this?"
- cb
winter darkness
a car follows its lights
over the hill
"How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?"
- William Blake
"How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?"
- William Blake
forsythia
the widow's blinds
part slightly
"If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
last lilac
the bee's shadow slips
to a lower leaf
flagstone moss
a daddy-long-legs steps
from dewdrop to dewdrop
"I have done my best . . . to write straightforward stories. I do not dare state that they are simple; there isn't anywhere on earth a single page or single word that is, since each thing implies the universe, whose most obvious trait is complexity."
- from preface to "Doctor Brodie's Report" by Jorge Luis Borges
"I have done my best . . . to write straightforward stories. I do not dare state that they are simple; there isn't anywhere on earth a single page or single word that is, since each thing implies the universe, whose most obvious trait is complexity."
- from preface to "Doctor Brodie's Report" by Jorge Luis Borges
dry creekbed
the gleam of a bullet shell
the only sound
deserted schoolyard
the fence he climbed over
to Iraq
The master, still: Basho, whose haiku range from the classic ideal of selfless objectivity, to the romantic stance of self-involved subjectivity.
You can go to the pine or bamboo. But not until you have "plunged deep enough into the object" will you discover "something like a hidden glimmering there".
The thing in itself,
in you,
in . . .
- cb, "Canadian Haiku Anthology" 1979
The master, still: Basho, whose haiku range from the classic ideal of selfless objectivity, to the romantic stance of self-involved subjectivity.
You can go to the pine or bamboo. But not until you have "plunged deep enough into the object" will you discover "something like a hidden glimmering there".
The thing in itself,
in you,
in . . .
- cb, "Canadian Haiku Anthology" 1979
she grows quiet
the drops of milk on my wrist
moonlit
"I saw a man, he danced with his wife"
- Lorenz Hart
"I saw a man, he danced with his wife"
- Lorenz Hart
smacked upside the head
by her snowball . . .
still in love
EARTHSHINE—in its 4th printing
The author reading from EARTHSHINE on YouTube . . .