Magnapoets Japanese Form

Nice to see Aurora's tanka and Ildi's on haystacks. Wonderful photo! Here's a piece I'm just writing having viewed a number of fields with these cake-like haystacks last weekend. Suggestions/Comments always welcome.
Ray

Haystacks

The haystacks of my boyhood were rectangular bundles, small enough to load by hand on the back of a pickup. There was an intimacy in working with them--the smell of cut grass, the rhythm of lifting and stacking, sweat stinging the eyes, the itch caused by the rough edges, an ice tinkling jug of lemonade at midday break.

Monet's haystacks series, done in rich pastels, represents the play of light at different times and seasons in the fields of his time. While no people are shown, so infused with the human are these images that one easily imagines farmhands scything the grass, forking it into yurt-like piles, cowlicks in their tousled hair, stopping occasionally to munch bread and cheese and to guzzle home brewed beer. 

Today, haystacks are rolls that resemble large golden cakes randomly strewn about the freshly mown fields. There's the same fragrance, but the land has the surrealistic look of a production line, absent of humans, as if the fields have been plundered rather than caressed. 

In one, long lines of bales are wrapped in white plastic, like sausages for a race of giants. I imagine Grant Wood's American Gothic, but without the pitchfork, the house, ultra modern, the wife's countenance, dour, as she puts everything in its right place at the dinner table, the family sitting as if at attention, the talk sanitized, a glass of buttermilk beside each plate. 

sunset
red plastic flowers 
on the war memorial

or

garage cleaning day
a thick layer of dust
on the canning jars

supermarket muzak
garden herbs in
plastic containers

after the drought
tall grass grows again,
in your kisses
the taste of sugarcane
once more

getting lost
in prairies grasses
taller than we were ---
twenty years later, still
how hard it is to find our way

photo taken and copyrighted by Ildi Lazar

waving from rooftops –
another party
in the French Quarter?

.

.

convention center — 
potty parity
in New Orleans

.

two days .....
after the hurricane –
tears for strangers

..

.

treading water:
“keep your chin up”
the President says

- originally posted in GW: "the check's in the mael(strom)" (f/k/a. Sept. 2, 2005); and see "one haijin's return to New Orleans: david lanoue" (F/k/a, Feb. 17, 2006) -

months later 
he still clutches 
the bowling ball— 
all he could salvage 
after Katrina 


remembering the Hurricane Katrina victims (Aug. 29, 2005)


janet lynn davis
Wisteria; MET

just past sunset - . . . . .
thunderheads overtake
a sepia-tinted cloud

my view
from the highrise --
breathtaking!
but how I long for the taste
of a home-grown tomato

.

homesick
in this large city
far from home
the smell of smoke
in my smoke-free room

.

photo taken and copyrighted by Roberto

.

cracked tomatoes
from grandfather’s garden. . .
summers later
the imperfections
grown sweeter in my mind   

 

one hundred degrees
pool all to myself---
I seal my eyes shut
imagine I’m hot hot hot
as a swimsuit model

[and that takes some imagining]

beneath the stream
from the old woman’s hose,
a small smiling girl
limbo-dancing
to summer

janet lynn davis
tanka first appeared in Ribbons (Tanka Cafe), 2006 and 2007, and Simply Haiku, 2005.