Carpe Diem #553, Grief

Jane Reichold offers an example of a haiku on GRIEF, an autumn kigo.

stone mountain
saying good-bye to him
was even harder

© Jane Reichhold

Autumn can inspire these feelings as the year winds down and the opportunities for regrets and wistful memories increase.  Then real life can intervene - especially in this gun-crazed country - with a horrible and utterly pointless tragedy.

moment of road rage

old man shoots a motorist

leaving two orphans

Afterthought - After reading Bjorn's and Lolly's my suspicion that this is a pretty awful haiku has been confirmed.  But it's raw and real, and it's all I've got, so I'll let it stand.

Carpe Diem #553, Grief

Carpe diem #95 -- Blues

BLUES

 Down in the delta
Them black folk singin' the blues
Through the cotton fields

 /  ~  /

Through the cotton fields
Work songs born in Africa
To Chicago bars

 /  ~  /

To Chicago bars
From Kansas City brothels
Workin' folks' music
 

 /  ~  /

Workin' folks' music
From the depths of the black soul
Wails of deep blue pain

 /  ~  /

Wails of deep blue pain
People's lives owned by masters
Cry out for freedom

 /  ~  /

Cry out for freedom
Sing a song of slavery
Blue in many shades
 /  ~  /

Blue in many shades

 Sky, water, black skin bruises
Down in the delta

CARPE DIEM # 95

My War Poem

Update 9/02/14:  I'm a day late to this prompt from The Garden, where Magaly asks if we have a favorite writing place.  I do not.  I have composed verse, prose and music in my head while driving on the expressway and while falling asleep [or more realistically tossing and turning] in bed at night.  Once in the white heat of inspiration I madly scribbled part of a story on a hotel room note pad while sitting in a food court at a mall in Toronto.

It's an Open Link Monday entry, with an opportunity to "link one of your poems, regardless of theme or format or date of publication." Recently I was rummaging through the archive and remembered this from a couple years back.
______________________

I was reading the chapter on war poems in Michael Bugeja's book last night and thought I didn't have a war poem in me.  Then I went to bed and composed this on my pillow before going to sleep.


THE GENERATION OF GREATNESS

We call them America's
Greatest generation
My father my uncles all those
Other men I worked with when
I started my first job in 1968
Were drunks

Years later Jimmy Carter would
Lobby against the 3 martini
Lunch these men lived on
Ice jammed into a short
Tumbler filled to the brim
With gin

Not so for my father a shot
And a beer man of simpler tastes
Kesslers and Strohs could
Get you just as drunk
Though maybe not quite
As fast

If they also serve who only stand
And wait what greater service it
Must be to get shipped across the Atlantic
Four fifths of the way back to
The place your mother escaped so many
Years earlier

He never told me what he did there
Nor of any British girls He might have
Americanized certainly not combat
Nor flying bombing missions
Maybe it was some dumb desk job with
A typewriter.

He told me once that to cure
The boredom he'd go into London
With his buddies on a Saturday night
And watch the bombs fall but
This might well have been
A lie

The booze was true though Gin
Whiskey Beer pick your medication
Anesthetic poured onto the
Scars crusting over deep
Old war wounds that never
Really healed 

Pandora

At jasmine calyx I found this picture and, of course, her wonderful poem.

Source

Which, of course, inspired me

Pandora
You are no villainess
You had no evil intent
Simply god-given curiosity
And bad judgment

Pandora
You are also a victim
Zeus knew you were only human
And gave you a temptation
No human could resist

Pandora
You are Eve in other guise
First woman, mother of all
Drawn by the lure of knowledge
Of good and packaged evil 

Pandora
You are as lovely
As a Tolkein elf
And with your human unwisdom
Have cursed us all

Forever

Sunday Whirl

Wordle 87

I wasn't going to do it this way.  I've already spoken out, and  Mystic handled it with such power and grace.  I wanted to do something frivolous, magical, enigmatic  .  .  .

I thought it might be fun to find a phrase to start each of 13 haiku to employ our baker's dozen words.  So I went to page 56 of my old paperback copy of Charles deLint's short story collection The Ivory And The Horn, and in the story "The Forest Is Crying" found this sentence.  "So he only had two images of them: down and out, or dressed in khaki, carrying an assault rifle."

Then the wordle words cried out to me.  So I cooperated with the inevitable. And now I am crying.

Reflections at Sandy Hook

An assault rifle
Quickest way to top off
Your list of victims

An assault rifle
speaks.  Now no way to lighten
Grief for those families

An assault rifle
Brings to visibility
A madman's sickness

An assault rifle
Speaks. Nothing to listen to
But report and screams

An assault rifle
Blast signalling the end of
An innocent life

An assault rifle
Slicks the corridors with pools
Of innocent blood

An assault rifle
Leaves no time for a gentle
Sigh - just violent death

An assault rifle
Speaks death.  Responder rushes
To the scene  .  .  .  Too late

An assault rifle
Scratches at the psychopath's
Wild murderous itch

An assault rifle
Left no doubt about how the
event unfolded

An assault rifle
Reflected in the glassy
Stare of madman's eyes

An assault rifle
Pierces a milky tableau
Leaving children dead

An assault rifle
And predictably we have
One more tragic end

Tragedy in a Schoolyard

Today a psychopath attacked school children at their school with murderous intent.

He wounded 22, but there were no fatalities.

This happened in China, where, due to the lack of readily available guns, he had to use a knife.

It's still a huge tragedy, but the parents of these children will be seeing them in recovery rooms, not morgues.

I am not making this up. Google it.

Also note, you almost never read about drive-by knifings, or innocents getting caught in the cross-stabbing.

Yes, people kill people. Guns simply make it a whole lot quicker, easier, more efficient and indiscriminate.

It's why we don't go to war wielding swords.