Driving home:
Summer night sky laden with
A golden full moon. 

Hot spring afternoon.
Bicyclists go speeding by,
Their bronze arms gleaming. 

The days are as long as a year.
Young dogs walk like old men.
Weed is bearded with seed and sun
is tarnished, a 1940 penny spent
on innocence. Men in faded denim look
and listen from a distance. Anger is near,
to speak face to face is far.

Years ago the playground yo-yo sprang.
Reels of boys unwound their springs
from coiled marble games, dispersed
with crows and grackles into August,
traitors foreign to their mothers,
their brown faces abstract over dinner.
Dandelions blew, cottonwood drifted…

Into Indian summer, season of guilt,
and brushfires wasting the hills
and children suddenly older the day
school began, their gamin grace rebuked
in clothes. Their absence autumns the fields.
The June cock pheasant has come of age.
Through our bones the awful seasons rage.

- Margaret Shipley

Spring afternoon:
Through the treetops,
A rustling breeze. 

The black bull bellowed before the sea.
The sea, till that day orderly,
Hove up against Bendylaw.

The queen in the mulberry arbor stared
Stiff as a queen on a playing card.
The king fingered his beard.

A blue sea, four horny bull-feet,
A bull-snouted sea that wouldn’t stay put,
Bucked at the garden gate.

Along box-lined walks in the florid sun
Toward the rowdy bellow and back again
The lords and ladies ran.

The great bronze gate began to crack,
The sea broke in at every crack,
Pellmell, blueblack.

The bull surged up, the bull surged down,
Not to be stayed by a daisy chain
Nor by any learned man.

O the king’s tidy acre is under the sea,
And the royal rose in the bull’s belly,
And the bull on the king’s highway.


 - Sylvia Plath

Snow yet remaining
The mountain slopes are misty—
An evening in spring.

- Sogi, from Three Poets at Minase, trans. by Donald Keene

During the misted darkness
Of the last rays of the sun.

- Shohaku, from Three Poets at Minase, trans. by Donald Keene

In the tall dry grass

The sparrows are fighting—

A field in summer.

This is almost a haiku—it falls short of, or exceeds the syllable count in a few places. still, like it too much to alter it further. I hope you like it, too!

Drone of lawnmowers
In the shimmering distance:
Dogs pant in the shade.

Hello, moon—
It’s good to see you again.
I’m sorry to be going so soon,
But please don’t put out your light—
I’ve got places to go tonight.

i like how cute this is. i think i might make it into something longer later. what do you think?