Roger Stevens goes biking and Mirjana Božin is listening to the soil's twilight

 

racing bicycles

on the road behind the hedge

late hawthorn blossom

Roger Stevens

 

 

 

Roger says:

After taking a haiku writing course with Alan Summers I began to grapple with the complexities of haiku. I managed one that seemed to be quite successful.

This summer I started again, and wrote some whilst walking on the Sussex Downs. It began as I was thinking about how late the hawthorn blossom seemed.

The comparison then fell into place. In fact there is a third layer to the story, the pace set by the poem's teller.

Sussex Downs, now part of the South Downs National Park Authority 

which spreads across East Sussex, West Sussex and Hampshire (England):

https://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/en_GB/trails/south-downs-way/

 

After taking the above-mentioned course by Alan Summers I can't say I am absolutely sure what a haiku actually is. But I like this one by Mirjana Božin:

watering the garden

I listen to the soil

whispering in the dark

Mirjana Božin

 

Roger adds:

It's about the sound of water seeping through the soil, and so it has a resonance with pleasant memories of gardening. But also because I've recently been reading about the sentience of trees, and how they communicate with one another through micro-organisms and fungus through the soil. As though whispering. 

I never was a big fan of Withnail and I. 

And so I have no favourite quote. 

If that gets me banned from Mahmight, so be it.

I said:

So you don't like Shakespeare?!  😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zEVZGuU3BU

 

Roger said:

I am a big fan of Waiting For Godot though. 

And Samuel Beckett.

    

Vladimir: You should have been a poet.

Estragon: I was. Isn't that obvious?

Thank you. 

Roger

PS Regarding Marmite. I quite like it. 

NOTES:

Roger Stevens

The Poetry Zone www.poetryzone.co.uk

Shop www.rogerstevensshop.com

Children's Poems on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/user/rogerstevenspoet

https://www.lovereading4kids.co.uk/author/1192/Roger-Stevens.html

YouTube channel for grown-ups  http://www.youtube.com/user/happy2oblige

Music www.reverbnation.com/rogerstevens

Twitter: https://twitter.com/poetryzone?lang=en

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/liz-brownlee/be-the-change/9781529018943

Mirjana Božin (Serbia) aka Mi Bo

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100025159083431

http://kamesanhaikublog.blogspot.com/2018/10/plodovi-duha-mirjane-bozin-12-novijih.html

http://kamesanhaikublog.blogspot.com/2018/10/u-ponedeljak-8.html

https://terebess.hu/haiku/nyugati/bozin.html

The  next generation of poets includes a number of interesting voices. Mirjana Božin tends to the understated, concise, miniature form, sometimes witty, always original, generally a brief idea expressed in one breath, as may be seen in her volume of haiku poems (Answer to the Sun's Ray, 1990). Her volume of poems (Immaculate Conception, 1991) suggests a new strength and range, and a particular concern with the destiny and, frequently welcome, solitude of women.

From 

“Voices in the Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia” 

by Celia Hawkesworth

REVIEW:

Women are conspicuously absent from traditional cultural histories of south-east Europe. This book addresses that imbalance by describing the contribution of women to literary culture in the Orthodox/ Ottoman areas of Serbia and Bosnia.

 

The first complete literary history in relation to women's writing in south-east Europe. The author provides a broad chronological account of this contribution, dividing the book into two main parts; the earlier period up until the eighteenth century concentrates on the projections of gender through the medium of oral tradition and the lives of a handful of educated women in medieval Serbia and the few works of literature they left. 

Hawkesworth also looks at the written literature produced by women, first in the mid-nineteenth century and then at the turn of the century. The second part focuses on the trials and tribulations that affected feminism and women's literature throughout the twentieth century. The author finishes by highlighting the new women's movement, 1975-1990, a great period for women in Yugoslavia which created a stimulating atmosphere for outstanding pieces of women's journalism, prose and verse, culminating in the creation of new women's studies courses in many universities.

 

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/austrian-history-yearbook/article/abs/hawkesworth-celia-voices-in-the-shadows-women-and-verbal-art-in-serbia-and-bosnia-budapest-central-european-university-press-2000-pp-281-illus-maps/8B7A2EA81528E9F4A0DF8706F277C1D2#

 

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/Voices-Shadows-Women-Verbal-Art-Serbia/30245620682/bd