Lifelong Renga: Winter 25
This second renga from the end of last year fell slightly more easily into the 20 verse nijuin renga structure (4/12/4), with just a couple of verses discarded and a few reordered to help the flow.
Some parts are more obviously composed as tanka than others, and as in general in these renga, the traditional apparatus of season words, moon, love, and flower references aren’t really present.
But, although most of these adhere to the 5/7/5;7/7 syllables count of the translated version of the verse form, I’m not really attempting an imitation of that structure.
I just want to look at things using the constraint of verse as a lens, and think about what that daily looking builds into.
*
To the rain’s delight,
the garden’s overgrown by
a pride of parsley.
In a quiet hospital
hope and hopelessness are still.
In the rain, a car
darts past with a Jack Russell,
it seems, at the wheel.
Oil bruises the rain-dark road:
a galactic jellyfish.
*
The sea delivers
its unassembled flat-pack
furniture: driftwood.
It’s up to us what we make
of or from what washes up.
Both ends of the beach
driftwood has been stacked into
skeletal tepees.
Between, a hopeful dog picks
a stick four times its own length.
Everybody does
the walking with coffee thing
they never used to.
Grails bearing the twin virtues
of conformity and warmth.
Days set out of time
As we reckon it, save us
from how we wreck time.
Grey skies, brisk waves, yellow-toothed
surf gnaws at Tyne’s Christmas shores.
Shapka Day at last!
Sky’s a purple-grey bruise;
ground wears arctic pelt.
Flakes the size of eyelids fall;
your tread remembers snow’s creak.
Waves’ shell-burst over
Sea wall catches light like snow:
Avalanche’s sibs.
Spray from the Black Middens' surf
is blown back towards the sea.
*
Shield’s white-walled towers
and the clouds at sea are made
brighter by snow’s light.
Pavement’s palimpsest mistakes
slush for ink and soles for print.
As snow clears, lost gloves
emerge from hibernation
and wave from fence posts.
Rich pickings amid the slush:
two five pence pieces, one ten.