the slit
in a cicada’s husk
hospice garden
Published by
Agnes Eva Savich
Agnes Eva Savich was born in Poland and grew up in Chicago where she graduated from Northwestern University at the end of the 20th century. She currently resides in Texas where she leads 3 poetry groups and plays the oboe in a quintet and orchestra. When not writing, she enjoys honing her skills in tango, skiing, tennis, golf, art, gardening, baking and going for regular hikes in nature.
View all posts by Agnes Eva Savich
That’s sad~~~
tulips in the garden
tulips in the park
two lips I like best are
two lips in the dark
What a beautiful written and crafted haiku . . . the way you set off the first line ("the slit") by itself is perfect. It is such a loaded word and also such a simple, unadorned visual. The endings at hospice and the ending of the cicada's cocooning as it emerges into its true life form. After having been to hospice when my mother-in-law was there prior to her passing, I can feel the sadness, the wonder and the miracle of death and crossing over in your poem. Beautifully done.
Agnes, your heartful haiku, and my echoed "copy" of your verse, may in themselves… juxtapose.
__ Some that read this, my "copied echo," may sense this as an insult to your fine haiku, 'tis not. I simply think that all things of life's "time," meet, at the same final point. Memories remain. _m
the gap
of this rust filled hull
dry-dock end
Agnes, what a beautiful haiku, poignant and very touching. I agree with Mary, that simple word, silt—so loaded, so simple…
Thank you.
Agnes, Agnes, my favorite Texan – I love this. I have always recognized the human-like quality of cicadas, with their big eyes, their song of love, and their sorrowful impermanence ( the husk, and the quietude after summer). Great resonance!
the slit
in a cicada’s husk
hospice garden
—AGNES EVA SAVICH
Brilliant use of one image against another image, in a powerful manner, and utilising Greek myth, for instance.
The use of silt, cicada, husk, and hospice, and juxtaposed against garden. A garden is a place of death as much as it is about life, just as the other words have their cycle of these dynamics.
Terrific poem!
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sick train the night heron shifts silt for all of us
Alan Summers
Publication credits: a handful of stones (2nd March 2011)
Anthology: A Blackbird Sings, a small stone anthology ISBN 978-0-9571584-2-9 ed. Fiona Robyn & Kaspalita Thompson (Woodsmoke Press 2012)
Thank you all so much for the appreciative comments. I had spent the day picking cicada husks off trees for the sample collection jars at Jeff Hoagland?s HNA pr?sentation about insects this summer and the poem subsequently came to me in thinking of all the hospice care situations (my grandmother?s, a friend?s husband dying of cancer…) and the poignancy of that juxtaposition.