blackberry bramble,
bearded rhododendron —
forty years together
Published by
Alexa Selph
Alexa Selph is a native Atlantan, where she works as a freelance book editor and teaches poetry in the adult education program at Emory University. Her poems have been published in Poetry, Smartish Pace, Hummingbird and Modern Haiku, among others.
View all posts by Alexa Selph
Oh Alexa, what a wonderful haiku. I agree with Dawn and enjoy the humour, but for me personally your poem also has had an overwhelming spiritual impact – the effect of a zazen saying by a zen master.
My own home is on an old style cottage block where former owners had planted miniature orchards and decorated with rhododendrons, but which had been overrun with blackberry brambles for at least a decade before we moved in. I continue to struggle to control the reemerging brambles after another decade.
Your haiku, Alexa, has pricked me like a blackberry thorn, to look again and where I am and what is going on in my life. I am challenged to reexamine the everyday environment surrounding me, including personal relationships, and my physical and social contexts, and like a good zazen experience you have provoked a satori moment!
Strider,
This is what I love about haiku, and poetry in general, the fact that we never know whether, or how, our words will be understood. I've had that same observation about the blackberry, which has both sweetness and more than a little prickliness!
Thank you for your kind words!
LIKE
love the humor I read in this. :)
Oh Alexa, what a wonderful haiku. I agree with Dawn and enjoy the humour, but for me personally your poem also has had an overwhelming spiritual impact – the effect of a zazen saying by a zen master.
My own home is on an old style cottage block where former owners had planted miniature orchards and decorated with rhododendrons, but which had been overrun with blackberry brambles for at least a decade before we moved in. I continue to struggle to control the reemerging brambles after another decade.
Your haiku, Alexa, has pricked me like a blackberry thorn, to look again and where I am and what is going on in my life. I am challenged to reexamine the everyday environment surrounding me, including personal relationships, and my physical and social contexts, and like a good zazen experience you have provoked a satori moment!
Wow! Thank you!
Strider
Strider,
This is what I love about haiku, and poetry in general, the fact that we never know whether, or how, our words will be understood. I've had that same observation about the blackberry, which has both sweetness and more than a little prickliness!
Thank you for your kind words!
Simply delightful!
Very well paced, this haiku_!
___I see too, nature's guests during those forty years. _m
knowing birds
among this ripened bramble
the thorns
lovely great
What a pair! Absolutely wonderful, Alexa. :)
marion