Night Sky [Haibun]

Flipping open the tent flap, I see a vast and glowing night sky. It's not the shabby patch of light points of my sky at home. Here, high in the mountains, far from any city, I can make out bands of color and dazzling webs of luminosity. 

And I can feel the tininess that past men must have felt, a diminished sense of importance that's hard to come by for a human standing on the Earth, where flags are planted everywhere and grand monuments to our pomposity are packed into dense clusters.



mountain sky.
the cloudless night
glows infinite 

Monsoon Skies [Haiku]

monsoon skies
hide behind the mountain,
creeping slowly

DAILY PHOTO: Chandravalli Lake

Taken on September 10, 2021 at Chandravalli Lake

POEM: Pale Skies

bleached in bright sunshine --
thin, wispy white clouds
are barely seen 
amid the washed out skies

some summer day -- 
sending one running 
for sunglasses
to avoid a blinding headache

it seems the world 
might fade into a 
tabula rasa, or
blanch anemically

Changing Skies: Three Tanka

I
a gray day,
low dreary clouds hang down;
smoky air
clings to the earth —
all is close; nothing moves

 

II
tall puffy clouds
drift across the sky
like ship’s bridges,
moving in armada
through skies, calm & blue

 

III
a blue dome,
unblemished by clouds
if not for birds
looking to the sky
would stop the world

POEM: A Low Layer of Rushing Clouds [Prose Poem]

A vein of graphite gray clouds glide — low and fast — under a static white ceiling. No  patches of blue peek through, today. Oh, where are those fast blackened clouds sailing at such a clip? And are the high white clouds truly still, or does the contrast with these fast clouds hide some sluggish drift. Maybe the higher clouds are too uniform — stretching out to all horizons — for motion to be seen.

Is this low layer of rushing clouds some kind of smoke monster or a drunkard’s dragon? Seems too motivated to just be water vapor.