fae iris magicks
sprinkled generously
bewitch passersby
Copyright 2014 Brenda Davis Harsham
Tag Archives: Flower
Nature’s Joy for Moms
Plugged into pretty pink,
Powered on, pumped and plumped,
Pleased to hear parties planned.
Just jazzed by joy,
Jumping for color,
Jogging my memory.
Many other happy springs:
Mingled colors and aromas,
Mother’s Day memories.
Copyright 2014 Brenda Davis Harsham
Note: This post is dedicated to all moms, full-time, part-time, for-all-time moms. Moms near, moms far, moms always in the heart, whatever the name: Mom, Mum, Mam, Mama, Mommy, Step-Mom, Ma, Mamasita, Mother. Please let me know other names for Moms, and I will add them here. Much love to all Moms!!
Happy Mother’s Day to these special moms:
Sue Ann, Fairport, New York (Get Well Soon and come home from the hospital, too!!)
Jessie, Palm Springs, California
Jo Anne, Los Angeles, California
Mary, Bedford, Massachusetts
Cathryn, Burlington, Massachusetts
Julie, Billerica, Massachusetts
Jennie, Billerica, Massachusetts
Mickey, Syracuse, New York
Susan, Fairport, New York
Ellen, Newton, Massachusetts
Donna, Machias, Maine
Elizabeth, or Betty, Matias, New York (and Happy Early Birthday, too!!)
Ideas Blossom at Writer’s Conference
Ideas blossom with a sweet fragrance,
Opening wider with rhythmic cadence,
Each part of nature has its special time,
Thoughts spring musically into joyful rhyme.
Copyright 2014 Brenda Davis Harsham
Note: Here is some pink for ThinkingPink. This weekend, I am away at the New England Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators spring conference. Ideas are flowing, and I’m jazzed and inspired. If you aren’t a member of a writing organization and you have not yet been to a writer’s conference, I hope you’ll consider it. Not that WP isn’t great, but meeting people in person is powerful, too. I’ll be back next week, and hoping to catch up with everybody!
Ditty on Pink
When your spirits start to sink,
Don’t over-think, drink in pink.
Begin to revive; continue to thrive:
Beauty multiplies love times five.
Copyright 2014 Brenda Davis Harsham
Note: This post is dedicated to MichelleMarie, who with Jeanne Marie, started thinkingpinkx2, which has been brightening up my reader. Michelle Marie speaks pink. Jeanne Marie says: “Pink is our retreat from the daily battles of life without giving up.” 🙂 Stop by there for some Pink Therapy, and you won’t be sorry!
Hectic Mountain Laurel
The invisible spring wind
Shakes silky blooming branches
And tastes sweet flower petals.
The flower fairy fragrance swirls.
The tallest branches dance,
Encircle the sun, hug the wind.
Copyright 2014 Brenda Davis Harsham
Triquain: Hyacinth
Hyacinth:
Flowers bow to morning,
Embracing hope for a warm spring,
Ready to rise up and have some fun in the sun,
Celebrating the warming spring days,
Dancing with new tulips:
Reverent.
Copyright 2014 Brenda Davis Harsham
Note: The triquain is a 7-line poem with syllables increasing then decreasing by threes: 3, 6, 9, 12, 9, 6, and 3. Longer versions and complicated repeating content are also common flavors, but I chose to keep it simple for my first try. This was inspired by the Paint Your World with Words Weekly Poetry Prompt, Triquain.
Full Bloom Tanka
crocus embracing,
offering nectar to bees
tickling, tiny feet
petals dancing with laughter
honey blossoms with flavor
Copyright 2014 Brenda Davis Harsham
Note: Tanka is defined in Oak Leak Tanka. Please feel free to add your haiku or tanka here, if you are moved to join in. 🙂 In the past, Japanese poets would alternative haiku (3 lines, 5/7/5 syllables) with two 7/7 lines, playing off each other’s work. It’s fun, if you want to try.
A Walk to the Lake Haibun
Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
I walked today, despite my recent recovery from norovirus and a week of not eating properly. I started off slowly, stretching sluggish muscles. My feet curved into the familiar rhythm, welcoming the soft, spongy aqueduct pathways. I headed for the lake side, wanting sunlight glinting strongly into my eyes after a winter of weak, gray light. I passed many gardens, my eyes yearning for color, a contrast to brown and gray.
seed pods straining, listening for the song of the wind
The wind did not disappoint, but sang of ocean waves. Seabirds called distantly, crows nearer. Robins quarreled over grasses. A cardinal flashed by, a scarlet blur. The air warmed to the sixties and finally snow seems truly gone. Was it icy only a few weeks ago? The sunlight made me feel alive, inside and out, and I turned upward, smile opening wide. Neither did the gardens disappoint, providing color in miniature.
saffron crocus
sunlight reincarnated
honey sweet scent
The yellow crocuses stopped me cold, so startled to see gold strewn on the ground, riches to my starved eyes. Most plants were still dormant, buds still tightly furled. Only the crocuses had thrown open the treasure box, spilling nature’s jewels. Words seem pitiful in comparison.
tiny crocus trio
blossoms dancing on breezes
music to my soul
Copyright 2014 Brenda Davis Harsham
Dovetailed deliciously with the Ligo Haibun Challenge, Quote Week.
Also includes a new form of poem, a monoku, that I cannot tell apart from the American Sentence Haiku.
Dreaming in Cherry Blossoms
Rain patters on the roof,
While the cardinal calls:
“Birdie, birdie, birdie, birdie.”
My eyes drift closed, heavy
With disappointment at the cold,
Wet spring and the absent sun.
Azaleas flame in raspberry bursts.
The weeping cherry cries amber tears
Of swollen pollen from pale pink blossoms,
Sunshine heats the wet sidewalk,
And it breathes steamy sighs.
A mist curls up toward the blossoms.
In my dream, my two arms multiply,
Turning to wings, to feathers, to thin limbs:
To an infant, a new weeping cherry.
My long arms tremble in air currents.
The cardinal lands on my highest shoulder
Calling “Birdie, birdie,” red crest proud.
I hear again the sound of the rain,
My dry roots yearn toward the nectar
Shared by clouds, whispering of oceans.
I awake stretching my legs,
Moving freely, but stiff and cold;
Blossoms, an afterimage, on my closed eyes.
Copyright 2014 Brenda Davis Harsham
Note: Inspired by Michelle Marie, who was longing to see cherry blossoms.
These photographs are from last spring.
Spring is Sprung
The fairies have been busy.
Under the deepest snow,
They have sprinkled vernal equinox sparkles,
And everywhere spring is springing!
Irises Hear Spring’s Song
Hyacinths Yearn toward the Sun
Crocuses Create a Green Crescendo
Copyright 2014 Brenda Davis Harsham
Visitor in the Temple Haībun
The February sunshine steeps your boughs
and tints the buds and swells the leaves within.
The groves were God’s first temples.
— William C. Bryant
Daily on my walks, I see miracles of beauty, hidden places that driving would never reveal. The slower I walk, with more deliberation and care, with time to look around, the more my soul lifts with the beauty casually offered to my eyes. Some combinations of shrub and tree were created with careful selection, pruning, fertilizing and skill beyond mine. I am the worshipper, visiting briefly in temples built by others.
Even my own garden has treasures I received, simply by deciding to dwell here. Some irises were planted by a previous owner. I thought they would be purple, and each year I waited for them to bloom. Their leaves never embraced a flower stem except once, overshadowed as they had become by the vigorous forsythia planted too close. One fall, I pruned back the forsythia. That next spring, the forsythia did not bloom, but the iris did: delicate and pale pink, with a creamy white interior.
not purple, unexpected
the pink of my son’s rosy cheeks
bearded iris bloomed
My neighbor, Terry, came down the driveway, waving, and calling to me. She told me she was delighted to see Reed’s irises in bloom after so many years. She asked for one, and I freely gave it. She told me about the woman who had planted them. Reed had developed brain cancer and was gone in a few months. The neighbors had come together to make the family meals while she enjoyed her last days, looking out on her garden. One neighbor came to play harp for her in the evenings. Now her garden is my garden, and her irises are in my care.
Last year, I moved all those irises away from the forsythia and into the sun. My neighbor, Terry, came by again: her iris had not survived. I told her I would give her another one day, once they had recovered from transplanting. One spring soon, I hope to see that pale pink flower again. I will care for them here, in my outdoor temple. As I tend the memories of my own mother.
mourning in shade
thick green bud rises in the sun
time to bloom again
Added by request, an old iris painting of mine, purple like the ones I carried at my wedding:
Iris 1 Painting by Brenda Davis Harsham
Copyright 2014 Brenda Davis Harsham
Inspired by the Līgo Haībun Challenge Prompt: Temple.
Crankypot Halloween
Friendly Fairy Tales is pleased to offer a Halloween story for Adventurous Fairy Tale readers, Crankypot Halloween. Here is an excerpt:
Through the house give glimmering light,
By the dead and drowsy fire;
Every elf and fairy sprite
Hop as light as bird from brier;
And this ditty, after me,
Sing, and dance it, trippingly.
First rehearse your song by rote,
To each word a warbling note:
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
Will we sing, and bless this place.
— William Shakespeare
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene II)
The gray-haired man sat tapping his fingers on his knee, without noticing tiny flickering lights under drooping dahlias, but he was aware of the darkening sky. He did not notice three raven nests in the tree across the street. A little girl followed the flickering lights, crying the whole way, closer and closer to where the man sat in the dark.
He heard her weeping by the gate, and shouted “Take your tricks elsewhere! No treats here!” He had been guarding his yard from the pitch-black of his porch for 25 years, not letting any trick-or-treaters through the gate, all lights off.
The crying got louder. “Go away, you can’t trick me!” He shouted again, unable to see anything with the sun sinking fast. He heard hiccups, then even louder wailing. He flipped the floodlights on, against his usual policy entirely. In the wash of yellow light, all the flickering twilight fairies hid, and the ravens called out, restless.
He sighed and approached the gate for the first time in 25 years on Halloween. In the light from his floodlights, he saw a little girl with blonde curls stuck to her wet cheeks. Tears were rolling down from her eyes, and dangling on the strands of her hair like dew. The straps of her pink butterfly wings had slid off her shoulders, and she clutched a pillow case tightly in a fist. She looked just like his daughter, Ella Mae, all those years ago when he caught her sneaking out to trick-or-treat behind his back. He had yelled at Ella Mae, and now she lived on the opposite side of the country.
“What’s the matter, girl?” He asked gruffly.
To find out what happens, whether tricks or treats, please click on Crankpot Halloween.
Copyright 2013 Brenda Davis Harsham
Friendly Fairy Tales 