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weather poem part 3: the hurricane (renga) (Haiku) by nypoet22

Everyone mentions the weather; the wind calls back cracks and fells branches. Each day branches, grows moments tethered to your heart, flows in the stiff breeze. Breezes carry drawn scenes to the eyes you stare through before loves shatter. Limbs shatter and fall, sneer, snicker, sheath their leaved grins beneath cracked windshields. Trucks hide their windshield faces kissing trees with tongues dampened in dewdrops. Dewdrops wake the day like a strewn palm frond fallen on a slalomed street. The hurricaned street punished, pounded with shouting children in her ears. Cover ears with palms mouth jacked open, jawbone set the storm will find you. You will stand speechless waiting, mouthing words written on a paper soul. Your soul, a willow, lowers her head, locks hanging over hiding eyes. And don't your eyes hide some mischievous greatness hatched from the egg carton? Chicks, cartons of smokes, nicotine working the room, grinning like white wine... Wham! Thud. Wine is blood aged fine like a drunk Jesus munching matzah balls. Balls-up bitten kid falls off his board, skins his knee, lies flat on the walk. Flocks of ducks follow, walk in his wake, hunt for crumbs to find his way home. There his home is your heart piping, gushing red gold in racetrack circles, Five hundred circles follow cars in flowing waves that shoot through your veins. Veins on the train tracks fight to hold moments, heading for that same railyard. The railyard in late November makes thanksgiving for each day living. Know that living is the present, gifted each day and remembered less. Less worth valued more is the way our days progress; so goes inflation. Inflation balloons from latex orbs at parties, rises to the sky. A dusk sky yawning tastes of peach and magenta, nectar on her claws. Desire's claws sharpened by each stare, each wayward glance held to the grindstone, Stone and flesh meet hard, come together with a crack of cane freshly cut. We play a cut scene of writing by candlelight; the power is out. Night creatures come out, the walls glow red with shadow dipped in God's own dark. Sweet dark breaks apart mangled by a brash, buzzing gas generator. Generator bits burn, bumble, hum some old tune too soon forgotten. I have forgotten where this hurricane began, lost in the moment. Keep this moment please protract its heart in your heart and remember me. Hear me call your name softly in the silent dark, wait, hold me, stop, stay. Shadows just stay here waiting, watching, hungering to breathe in your arms, Asleep in your arms, frozen in your eyes; goodbye, the eye of my storm. Twenty-three storms break swarm the Gulf with a rumble with a flash and crack. Branches crack and fall the wind calls back; the weather mentions everyone.

nypoet22 11-Oct-06/2:55 AM
an actual renga, of which the above is really just a rough copy, is described by padgett's handbook of poetic forms as a long, image-filled poem, from which came the later forms of haiku and senryu. each stanza contains some sort of link to the one before it, but not to the one before that. unlike my poem, the old fashioned renga alternates stanzas of three lines and two. as far as i can tell it is not as strict about keeping syllabic meter, though from the ones i've seen the lines seem to stay pretty short. 36 stanzas is the most popular length, though in the past they frequently ranged in the hundreds. the opening stanza (hokku) should suggest a season and place (this is where haiku comes from, and often a renga opens with a haiku); subsequent verses may be either about the beauty of nature (like haiku) or the humor of humanity (like senryu). each stanza should be somehow linked to the stanza before it, but not to the stanza before that. the renga is supposed to kind-of jump around from theme to theme, and the image of each subsequent stanza may connect by parallel image, contrasting image, shift of focus to a different aspect of the same image, pun, play on words, same mood, contrasting mood, etc.

the first 8 stanzas are described as a party's beginning, a somewhat formal introduction; the middle 20-ish are like the heart of the party where you loosen up a little; the last 6-8 are like the party's end, clearing things up and getting ready to go home. when done as a group, each poet adds a verse and passes it on to the next.




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