NaHaiWriMo 2021 Day 14

Playing catch up – make sure to click back or forward and read every post. The prompt for day 14 was “stairway to heaven”.

a Sunday birthday

worshipping and chocolates

a glimpse of heaven

#NaHaiWriMo Day 7 2021

Today’s prompt was: tusk

mother elephant
leading and protecting
pulling him to my side

I wanted to write something dark about a bone, but I couldn’t make it work. So I did a mom poem instead. Did you know that elephants are one of the many animals that are matriarchal?

NaHaiWriMo 2021 Day 6

Today’s prompt is: The Chain

family recipe
I watch her pour the sauce
birds in the same nest

I try to not use the exact word in the haiku I write for the day, so I wrote a haiku about how traditions link us together.

Evergreen Haiku

small evergreen tree
covid can't stop Christmas
some things don't die

12-28-2020

A long time ago, I read an article that said to try to write evergreen content for your blog. To write about subjects in a such a way that people will always need to read your content. I have found that very hard to do.

The posts I wrote about things like pollution that I thought everyone would like, almost no one reacted to. But my quotes get new likes all of the time and I haven’t been posting those for years. To see which of my posts stay evergreen read my wrap up posts.

I am from Rolling Farmland

Fill in the Blank Poem with my Heart

I am from a bread pan
from a dirt road & a farm house
I am from strength & stubbornness,
I am from cattle
(not the smartest but not dumb enough to go down the chute willingly).

I am from the Polish,
pierogi & czernina.
I am from dusky nights in the hay barn.

I’m from a grandfather who survived The Great Depression,
And a picture’s worth a thousand words
But you can’t see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should’ve seen it in color

Even now,
I am from rolling farmland
From quiet evenings in the barn,
He just takes the tractor another round
And pulls the plow across the ground
And sends up another prayer

Symanntha Renn © April 29, 2020

This week has been haphazard; full of waiting, praying, crying, and relenting. But I am born from strength and stubbornness so I go on. I thought I had a haiku scheduled to go up yesterday but I did not. So today I give you a deeply personal poem. Yes, it is made from a fill in the blank form. But I put my memories and the lyrics of some songs that touch my heart in the poem. Comment below if you can name the songs or if you know what czernina is.

Haiku Hum

at home with my son
where the hummingbirds hum
and the robins nest
  5-28-20

If you notice my tagline is flowers, faith and family. Those really are my favorite topics to write about. I sometimes feel I need to write political poems. I have been painting political paintings lately. I can’t decide whether to do happy paintings and sad poetry or a mixture of both. Do I have to pick a lane, or can I just do everything??

National Haiku Writing Month of 2020

walking the trail
through our favorite park
husband and wife muskrat
  2-25-20

little known mountains
our car points straight uphill
the goat herd ascends
  2-25-20

We are getting to the end of National Haiku Writing Month for 2020. I think I may have enjoyed this year more. I didn’t read the poems by other poets on Facebook this year and I think that’s good because I didn’t compare my poems to anyone else’s, I just wrote. I also didn’t try to post every week day and wear myself out. I just wrote. I wrote some longer poems as well, and plan to share those with you in March.

I would love your feedback in the comments. Do you think I should have shared my haiku one at a time? Do you think that I should have posted them to the Facebook page? Do you think I should have used the days as the titles for my posts as in years past? Leave me your thoughts.

Nibbling on Haiku

at grandma’s house
son nibbling on an Oreo
squirrel with a walnut
11-26-18

 

Sometimes you look over and see your kid being cute and you have to write about it. The squirrels at my mom’s house are very friendly and very visible. They are also spoiled as they live at Grandma’s house.

Practice Your Goodbyes

Practice Your Goodbyes

You’ve not got as much time as you think
Life passes you by as you blink
So practice your goodbyes now
Practice while there is time to make mistakes
Tomorrow may bring a dark sky
Tomorrow may make you cry
And all the time you thought was there
Was spent without much care
No more chances for that conversation
It is, how it was
So practice your goodbyes with vigor
Life goes by faster than you figure
So make the hugs long and tight
Hold off goodbye with a fight
Talk through the night into the day
For our loved ones here, do not stay

 

 

I wrote this one a long time ago. I was looking through my poetry to find one I had written for my son and decided it was time to share my old stuff again. The break in the rhyme pattern is there to jar you, as death always does.

PAD Challenge Day 15

  I am the Door

I am the tall wooden front door

you must pass through me to explore

the people inside

dirty shoes can’t hide

you’ve been eyed

off my floor

photo curtesy of Poets.org

Today’s prompt was to write a metaphor poem. I used a welsh form called clogyrnach. It is a 6 line stanza with an ab rhyme scheme. It is about how the mom is often the door to the family and we have to be careful about who we let in. 

Day 7 NaHaiWriMo 2018

a quilt from mom
mother rabbit pulls her fur
out to line the nest

 

Today’s prompt was “wrapped in a quilt, watching a meteor shower” which is a lot of concrete images. I tried to capture the warmth that comes from a moment like that. A haiku is supposed to reference nature; if there is no element of nature the poem is a senryu.
You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. You can find other haiku poets on those sites as well. Search the hashtag #NaHaiWriMo to find us. Many of us post new poetry right to those sites as well as our blogs.

If you like haiku and want to learn more, then go to my What is Haiku? page. Also, stop by the Facebook page where most of us poets meet to get a prompt and share our work.

Tanka Freeze

  Freeze

the ground freezes

but my baby never has

he grows to a boy

nothing can hold him still

propelled by winds of change

  4-14-17

 

Sometimes it is crazy how fast they grow. Here is a tanka that I forgot I wrote. I go through my poetry at the beginning of the year and get it all organized and put into Word Documents and on my Evernote account so that I don’t lose any of it. Do you do that as a writer or poet?