Poets Salon: Finding Your Heart on a Walk

POETS SALON

Heart on a Walk, Echocardiogram (Photo – Kath Abela Wilson)

– 11/20/19

Hosted by Kath Abela Wilson

The steady rhythm has a beauty of shape and sound. I sit next to the echocardiogram technician. Cardiac stress test. He asks me my name, and I tell him.

I knew that
already, he says, I see it
written on his heart

~ Kath Abela

Ο Ο Ο

Heart-Shaped Moss on a Tree photo by Sigrid Saradunn

Sigrid Saradunn

Early Nor’Easter

limbs and leaves scattered
bark with moss underfoot.

a gaze at the tree next to the car
on the tree at just the right height
a heart sketched in moss.

Ο Ο Ο

Heart-shaped Tree found on a walk (Photo – Jackie Chou)

Jackie Chou

the rustle
of my fickle heart
windblown leaves

left unsaid
what’s whispered through leaves
of a heart-shaped tree

my world
once lackluster
is now
full of your stardust
raining down on me

Ο Ο Ο

Nest for my heart (Photo – Lynne Jambor)

Lynn Jambor

At our haiku gathering in Seabeck, Washington, I was overcomewith a sense of timelessness that accompanies a walk when seasons change, as they always have, and always will. We had a family cottage that my husband built on Richardson Lake in the Gatineau Hills, about an hour away from Ottawa, Ontario. Our small lake and ten cottages were of the people and subsequent families that my husband had met when he was first living in Ottawa as a PhD candidate and poor student. We lived in it many summers and weekends. My heart overflows with those memories when I am least expecting it.

forest bathing
red maples with a hint
of woodsmoke

Yesterday, as I was walking to and from Stanley Park in Vancouver BC, amongst the wet sodden leaves on the ground, I was moved to touch the softly growing green of the forest trees as well as the sidewalk ones which all have moss growing on the north side. These have been here, and the moss has grown here, for time immemorial. First Nations tribes have had the same experience of marveling at the trees’ moss, so quiet, secure, and inevitable for generations, no matter what gets built around them. This particular day it was drenching rain and I in all my rain gear…

winter rain
the moss on the north side
still soft

Ο Ο Ο

Cactus Heart in Atwater Village, Los Angeles (Photo – Meher McArthur)

Meher McArthur

heart-shaped cactus
it stopped me
In my tracks today

Ο

Finding Your Heart on a Walk: Quotes and Credits

Sigrid Saradunn, an artist and poet, lives in Ellsworth, Maine near Bar Harbor. She has been a self-taught artist since childhood. After graduating nurses training to become an RN, she continued practicing her art. She still paints regularly on Mondays and Fridays with the Vagabonds, a year round group in Somesville, Maine since 2002. She has painted for 20 years with the Wednesday Portrait Painters group in Blue Hill, Maine. She has published in many anthologies and writes with Tanka Poets on Site. Her eye for detail, and warm emotional expression, has graced our Poets Salon before. She says: “I have a day after Valentine’s Day birthday…hearts always seem to speak to me wherever I am. I find them in nature.”

Jackie Chou lives in Pico Rivera, California. She meets weekly with Poets on Site in Pasadena, and shares her poems in many journals and anthologies worldwide, as well as many local readings and events. Recently, she began an ambitious project called Buson 100. Inspired by the Japanese poet Buson, 1717 – 1784, she’s writing about 10 haiku a day and other Asian forms, finding it beneficial to her writing life. Her poems in our salon were generated by this effort, which incorporates a sensitivity to details in nature and human experience.

Lynne Jambor has been writing haiku and related forms for almost six years. She has been greatly influenced by extensive encouragement of the supportive haiku community. She’s published in various anthologies, including Haiku Society of America, Seabeck, and the Portland, Arbutus (Victoria), and Vancouver Groups. Lynne is executive secretary of Haiku Canada and a member of the HC Archive committee. She has also been a coordinator of ‘Haiku House’ for the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Sakura Days Japan Fair. Lynne is Co-Chair of HNA 2021 in Victoria BC, Canada.

Meher McArthur is an Asian art historian specializing in the arts of Japan. She has spent the last two decades curating exhibitions, teaching and writing books and articles about Asian art and culture. She currently works as Academic Curator at Scripps College, Claremont, and Creative Director at the Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden in Pasadena. She occasionally finds herself writing poems.

♣ A note from Kath Abela

Send short poems, haiku, senryu, tanka, cherita haibun, tanka prose, short prose poems, etc., or your own unique approach, on future themes of our Poets Salon: “Inside and Out,” “Something New (year),” “Fresh Start,” “New Tradition,” “The Old Way,” and “Rose Parade.”

Write and send on your most important “Social Issue”.  Send to Kath Abela by Facebook message or click here to email her directly. We can feature your work again after five months. Multiple Submissions can be saved to appear later.

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