summer solstice
the first dahlia
so brazenly itself
Author: Hannah Mahoney
Hannah Mahoney’s debut haiku chapbook, Shifting Light, is available from Backbone Press. She is a featured poet in New Resonance 12 and a recipient of both the Kaji Aso International Haiku Award and the Kaji Aso International Senryu Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
high surf
before the hurricane . . .
plovers huddle in the dunes
garden catalog
I order some irises
called Butterflies in Flight
drizzling glaze
on the orange bundt cake
long summer days
New Year’s Day
a roseate spoonbill
lifts into dawn
lingering heat
a peach grows heavy
on its stem
late-summer tidepool . . .
rockweed sways
with the in-and-out of waves
snow saucer
my daughter and I
spin through winter
autumn surf
a flutter of terns almost lands
then lifts away
the just-purple
of beach plums
a tern’s whistle
waning light
a cormorant and I
linger in deep water
summer quiet
the tallest daylily
sways
morning quiet
a minnow
nabs a gnat
dappled light
blackbird calls
crisscross the path
meant for each other
this light
and the daylily
the high meadow
a cicada’s whine
sharpens into silence
late-summer quiet
cattails
starting to shred
slate sky . . .
deleting the dead
from my Christmas list
just this morning
the first magnolia buds
opening—
my mother’s unwed initials
on the suitcase she brought east