Poetry Corner: Regional Reading – A Sense of History

POETRY CORNER – The Regional Reading

Cactus (Photo – Jari Thymian).

– 08/30/17

Hosted by Kathabela Wilson

A sense of history! Each of us lives within the land of regional and personal history. The depth of feeling is layered. Robert Forsythe, in the Washington DC area, and Anita Guenin, in Southern California, strongly express in their haiku an emotional and philosophical grasp of their place within a larger picture felt as personal and universal.

This is the fourteenth in our series of Regional Reading haiku Poetry Corners featuring haiku poets who will be visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico in September for Haiku North America 2017*. Our corners develop from the themes highlighted by their poems and concerns.

~ Kathabela

Washington, D.C. (Photo – Kathabela Wilson).

Robert Forsythe

In the Washington DC area there are constant reminders of the area’s history as well as the nation’s. It is often the place where people from all over come to feel a connection with what has come before and with what made us. In living with the battlefields of the Virginia countryside, Arlington National Cemetery, the monuments and museums of the Mall that spread out before it, and the mundane centers of Government activity throughout the area, we see on a daily basis that history is more than the past.

watching over
the cherry blossom crowds
holocaust museum

fort myer
the sound of taps
from across the wall

sweat of new recruits
at the drill field’s edge
cicada shimmering

new memorial
marble dust
not yet taken by the wind

The DC area is not brown. It has four distinct seasons and each brings its own unique color scheme and its own unique rituals and moods.

five hours of dawn
this gray winter day
five hours of dusk

neighborhood gardens –
before the daffodils fade
upturned bottoms bloom

porch sitting day
everything
buzzing from the heat

peak foliage
sakura zensen
heads south for the winter

Poet Robert Forsythe lives in Annandale, VA, a suburb of Washington, DC.

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Mirage (Photo – Kathabela Wilson).

Anita Guenin

peyote dreams –
saguaro wave their arms
in praise

mirages –
shimmering in black top
the dream of another life

half baked –
a pr​airie dog’s head
rises into the day’s heat​

immigrant trail –
the grit of sand
between the teeth

Anita Guenin says: “​Before I arrived in Arizona, I created a place that existed only in my mind. Phoenix was going to be a village of low slung adobe houses and shops​ ​where I would find many friends in spirit. Of course, it wasn’t like that at all, so when it was time to go, I didn’t look back as our plane crossed over from the arid landscape onto a strip of green far below. San Diego is a place of infinite possibilities, but in time, my ashes will still go home to a ​wild-flowered hill in Rhode Island overlooking the Pawcatuck River​”​.

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> Photos by Greg-Fischer.

*The Regional Reading will be performed live at the conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in September, 2017, led by Kathabela Wilson. The dramatic presentation will be accompanied by Rick Wilson on flutes of the various regions. Poets from Australia, India, Canada, United States, and many other regions will be presenting. Look for their haiku in future Poetry Corners.

> You may also want to check:

• POETRY CORNER – The Regional Reading (13)

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