ukiaHaiku a few of the award winning haiku

This year the entries for the ukiaHaiku Festival topped 1500. That may make us the largest and maybe even most universal Haiku Festival. We had entries from states as far away as Maine, and covering 3 continents.

The first place Adult Contemporary is by Sylvia Forges-Ryan of North Haven CT

A soldier's headstone-
between one date and another
so short a line

First place Adult Traditional is by Timothy Russell of Toronto OH

receding thunder
a hummingbird in and out
of the daylily

Adult, about Ukiah by Sherry Weaver Smith of San Ramon CA

early May morning
running up the hill to see
the mountain beyond

Youth 7-12 grade, about Ukiah by Alicia Erostico of Ukiah

Lake Mendocino
full of water
sometimes

Children K-6, about Ukiah by Megan Baker & Drew Smith of Ukiah

jump jump jump rope
on a hot Ukiah day
a cold glass of lemonade

Ukiah Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day
April 30, 2008

All the True Vows

David Whyte

All the true vows
are secret vows
the ones we speak out loud
are the ones we break.

There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.

Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don't turn your face away.

Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.

Those who do not understand
their destiny will never understand
the friends they have made
nor the work they have chosen

nor the one life that waits
beyond all the others.

By the lake in the wood
in the shadows
you can
whisper that truth
to the quiet reflection
you see in the water.

Whatever you hear from
the water, remember,

it wants you to carry
the sound of its truth on your lips.

Remember,
in this place
no one can hear you

and out of the silence
you can make a promise
it will kill you to break,

that way you'll find
what is real and what is not.

I know what I am saying.
Time almost forsook me
and I looked again.

Seeing my reflection
I broke a promise
and spoke
for the first time
after all these years

in my own voice,

before it was too late
to turn my face again.

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 29, 2008

Katha Pollit

SMALL COMFORT

Coffee and cigarettes in a clean café,

forsythia lit like a damp match against

a thundery sky drunk on its own ozone,

the laundry cool and crisp and folded away

again in the lavender closet --- too late to find

comfort enough in such small daily moments

of beauty, renewal, calm, too late to imagine

people would rather be happy than suffering

and inflicting suffering. We’re near the end,

but oh, before the end, as the sparrows wing

each night to their secret nests in the elm’s green dome,

oh, let the last bus bring

lover to lover, let the starveling

dog turn the corner and lope suddenly,

miraculously, down its own street, home.

S

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month HAIKU of the Day April 26, 2008

REMINDER!!!! – 6^th Annual ukiaHaiku Festival Sunday, April 27 2-4 PM, Conference Center, dedicated this year to the memory of Ukiah Librarian, Dori Anderson

Keynote Speaker: Donna Kerr, Willits Librarian

CLASSICAL HAIKU MASTERS

Snow has melted

how happy they look –

the faces of stars

Issa

Autumn begins –

ocean and fields

all one green

Basho

Winter sun –

frozen on horseback

is my shadow

Buson

MODERN HAIKU

The Golden Gate

creaks

With sunset rust – Jack Kerouac

From across the lake,

Past the black winter trees,

Faint sounds of a flute. – Richard Wright

time out

the setting sun

takes center field – Peggy Lyles

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 25, 2008

Sonnet Week!

PABLO NERUDA (tr. by Ben Belitt)

XC

I dreamed that I died: that I felt the cold close to me;

and all that was left of my life was contained in your presence:

your mouth was the daylight and dark of my world,

your skin, the republic I shaped for myself with my kisses.

Straightway, the books of the world were all ended,

all friendships, all treasures restlessly cramming the vaults,

the diaphanous house that we built for a lifetime together –

all ceased to exist, till nothing remained but your eyes.

So long as we live, or as long as a lifetime’s vexation,

love is a breaker thrown high on the breakers’ successions;

but when death in its time chooses to pummel the doors –

there is only your face to fill up the vacancy,

only your clarity pressing back on the whole of non-being,

only your love, where the dark of the world closes in.

XC

Pensé morir, sentí de cerca el frío,

y de cuanto viví sólo a ti te dejaba:

tu boca era mi día y mi noche terrestres

y tu piel la república fundada por mis besos.

En ese instante se terminaron los libros,

la amistad, los tesoros sin tregua acumulados,

la casa transparente que tú y yo construímos:

todo dejó de ser, menos tus ojos.

Porque el amor, mientras la vida nos acosa,

es simplemente una ola alta sobre las olas,

pero ay cuando la muere viene a local la puerta

hay sólo tu mirada para tanto vacío,

sólo tu claridad para no seguir siendo,

sólo tu amor para cerrar la sombra.

Ukiah Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day
April 25, 2008

WILD GEESE

Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things

April is National Poetry Month

Ukiah Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day

April 24, 2008

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 24, 2008

Sonnet Week!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

(Thanks, Sally Gearhart, for the suggestion!)

clxviii

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines

And keep him there; and let him thence escape

If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape

Flood, fire, and demon – his adroit designs

Will strain to nothing in the strict confines

Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,

I hold his essence and amorphous shape,

Till he with Order mingles and combines.

Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,

His arrogance, our awful servitude:

I have him. He is nothing more nor less

Than something simple not yet understood;

I shall not even force him to confess;

Or answer. I will only make him good.

April is National Poetry Month

Happy Birthday
William Shakespeare

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day

April 23, 2008

52

So am I as the rich, whose blessed key

Can bring him to his sweet up-lockèd treasure,

The which he will not ev’ry hour survey,

For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.

Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,

Since seldom coming in the long year set,

Like stones of worth they thinly placèd are,

Or captain jewels in the carconet*.

So is the time that keeps you as my chest,

Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide,

To make some special instant special blest,

By new unfolding his imprison’d pride.

Blessed are you whose worthiness gives scope,

Being had to triumph, being lacked to hope.

William Shakespeare

1609

April 23 is celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthday.

If alive, he would be 444 years old today.

He died on April 23, 1616.

* A carconet was a style of necklace with a

large jewel at the bottom center, other

smaller jewels in the rest of the necklace.

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Poetry Month
April 23, 2008

Sonnet 54

O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,

By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!

The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem

For that sweet odour which doth in it lye

The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye

As the perfumed tincture of the roses,

Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly

When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses:

But, for their vitue only is their show

They live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade;

Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;

Of their sweet death are sweetest odours made:

And so of you, beauetous and lovely youth,

When that shall fade, by verse distils your truth

April is National Poetry Month

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Library Month
April 22, 2008

WANTING MORE AND MORE

TO LIVE UNOBSERVED, UNOBSERVING

Jane Hirshfield

Wanting more and more to live unobserved,

unobserving,

like a dog who takes the bone and goes to another room

where it just fits under the low-legged table or couch.

In the farthest depths, no sunlight reaches.

Yet certain fish, now eyeless streak with luminescence

when excited;

a lowered bathyspere turns on a floodlight

and is mobbed, the strange-formed bodies drawing in for miles.

No one was ever meant to see this.

Certainly not the fish, who see nothing, whose

tentacles travel the cold light, and no one know how or why.

Like human beings to a mystery

They imagine feels some passion for their fate.

And the dog? Fallen into the marrow-pleasure completely.

Willits Library National Library Month Poem of the Day April 22, 2008

Special Earth Day Poem

Philip Appleman

Last-Minute Message for a Time Capsule

I have to tell you this, whoever you are:

that on one summer morning here, the ocean

pounded in on tumbledown breakers,

a south wind, bustling along the shore,

whipped the froth into little rainbows,

and a reckless gull swept down the beach

as if to fly were everything it needed.

I thought of your hovering saucers,

looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down,

so it wouldn’t be lost forever –

that once upon a time we had

meadows here, and astonishing things,

swans and frogs and luna moths

and blue skies that could stagger your heart.

We could have had them still,

and welcomed you to earth, but

we also had the righteous ones

who worshipped the True Faith, and Holy War.

When you go home to your shining galaxy,

say that what you learned

from this dead and barren place is

to beware the righteous ones.

April is National Poetry Month

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Poetry Month

April 19, 2008

Just As You Said Love

It’s A Death

‘runners using the heart to span the brink of disaster’

Mary Norbert Korte

mark this night carved upon the breast carved

deep into the skin as the scars of some

mediaeval mystic everyone left alone

mark this down into the belly where it

disappears under the shadow that shadow inside

where love dries stiff clotted dries where

madrone blossoms sit like virgins burning

inside a remembering dark this night

carved upon the breast carved

upon the nipples lifed like amaranth

it is the tough the touch that scores

the skin this blossomed flesh the moss rose

lips lying the tongue at those petals

the light dimmed by the body the learning

the night this marked night carved upon the breath

carved into the hollow space where passion sits

thingking with branches growing from it

growing branches that bargain for some light

where the only light is stubs in flames that lick

the air slowly of its breath its breath

carved into thighs the strong swelling

the proud the pulse the seed the great

thrust leaping in the hands into a vortex a vortex of

bent trees ghost cries amaranth moss rose amaranth

just so love it’s a death a drawing out of life

fine as silt through spread hands fine as fire

this cold spring dried fine and rooted with pain

a world gathered against the skin a world

heaving and backing about the breast covered

with moss rose with coral root with amaranth amaranth

the breast all covered and carved with holy saving this night

set rivers in stone tumbling and pushing to the sea

Sanctuary Station

28 May 1977

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 19, 2008

Poem for the 1^st Passover Seder

MARGE PIERCY

Matzoh

Flat you are as a door mat

and as homely.

No crust, no glaze, you lack

a cosmetic glow.

You break with a snap.

You are dry as a twig

split from an oak

in midwinter.

You are bumpy as a mud basin

in a drought.

Square as a slab of pavement,

you have no inside

to hide raisins or seeds.

You are pale as the full moon

pocked with craters.

What we see is what we get,

honest, plain, dry

shining with nostalgia

as if baked with light

instead of heat.

The bread of flight and haste

in the mouth you

promise, home