from a gliding boat,
a little blue flower spied
as all else blurs.
Little Blue [Haiku]
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Category Archives: poem
Nature’s AC [Haiku]
water rolls past
moss green rocks;
hikers pause in cool.
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Tree Hell [Tanka]
pine cone wedged
in a rotten sleeper,
on derelict tracks,
may become a tree
and made into sleepers.
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BOOK: “Lonesome Cities” by Rod McKuen
LONESOME CITIES LTD EDIT by Rod McKuenMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Google Books Page
Rod McKuen is the posterchild for poets who were loathed and brutalized by critics, yet who had massive popular followings. He is the Minecraft Movie of poets. McKuen was also a songwriter and recording artist. Poet and lyricist seem almost identical career fields (one makes money for being a simplified version of the other [the poor] one,) but I suspect in their differences one finds a big chunk of the resolution to the aforementioned disparity. At the end of this collection is a chapter entitled “13 Songs” that contains a baker’s dozen of poems that are pop lyric-esque. Until I got to these, I thought McKuen may have been getting an unfair wrap for being schmaltzy and pedestrian, but when I got to them, I could see the truth in the criticism.
This is not to say McKuen would have been as harshly judged today as he was in 1968 when this book came out. He was a bisexual man who is most famous for writing “Seasons in the Sun” (an unambiguously schmaltzy song made popular by Terry Jacks in a much more up-tempo version,) and in an era in which academics were “total squares.”
At any rate, this collection, which is largely organized by city, is a fun read.
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Prickly Pear [Haiku]
prickly pears bloom:
yellow offering bowls —
bees give & take.
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Vanishing [Haiku]
moving up valley,
fog thickens until there
is only the step.
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Mountain Blue [Haiku]
mountain skies:
fade to a blue so deep
it chills the bones.
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This Is Not My World [Free Verse]
Every once in a while,
you see a sight
that makes you say,
"This cannot be
the world I know!"
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Monster Toes [Free Verse]
tree trunk studded by thorns
that look like
mean monster toenails
with gnarly green cuticles,
even tree-huggers stay at
arm’s length.
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Wake [Haiku]
boat chugs upriver,
slipping from sight, but for
its wake's arrow.
