in my ribcage
the hollow-tube whooping
of the siamangs
Alex Fyffe
At the World of Primates, I was drawn to the two siamangs having a conversation that everyone could eavesdrop on from a mile away, according to the informational podium by their enclosure. The sound resonated through me, and if I opened my mouth, perhaps I, too, could whoop without shame.
More about Siamangs:
https://news.mongabay.com/2015/08/the-siamang/
A favorite:
silence–
the heart of the rose
after the wasp leaves
Elizabeth Searle Lamb
Lamb's poem fills me with a sense of violation, of the terrible silence that follows an unwanted encounter. It echoes Blake's sick rose, which is destroyed by the "dark secret love" of "an invisible worm / That flies in the night." The wasp has had its way, and now that it has buzzed off somewhere, the rose is left hollowed out, facing the vast silence that can only be found inside the heart.
The Elizabeth Searle Lamb poem can be found in The Unswept Path: Contemporary American Haiku, ed. John Brandi and Dennis Maloney (2005)
https://bookshop.org/books/the-unswept-path-contemporary-american-haiku/9781893996380
Favorite Waiting for Godot quote:
"Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors."
Favorite Withnail and I quote:
"Go with it. It's society's crime, not ours.”
An extra note from Alan:
ILLUMINATIONS:
“It is to capture the moment: light on a bricked-up window in Greenwich Village, faint crowing of a rooster early in the morning after a death has come, colored sails in an Amazon harbor after rain. It is to track down the elusive dream: a white raven in the desert, an abandoned water tower, the real wetness of incomprehensible tears. It is to resurrect a tiny prism of memory into a moment that lives with color, scent, sound. These are, for me, the functions of haiku, senryu, and the short lyric. Captured in the amber of words, the moment endures.” —Elizabeth Searle Lamb
the wasp nest
paper-heavy in the lilac
June morning
Elizabeth Searle Lamb
Hummingbird vol. V, no.3 March 1995
https://bashosroad.outlawpoetry.com/elizabeth-searle-lamb-the-wasp/elizabeth-searle-lamb/haiku/
More about Elizabeth Searle Lamb:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Searle_Lamb
https://livinghaikuanthology.com/index-of-poets/livinglegacies/5938-lamb,-elizabeth-searle.html
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