Spring Cascade [Haiku]

Photograph of Shaki Waterfall in Armenia. Taken during the Spring.
Spring waterfall
grows by the day as ice --
somewhere -- shrinks.

False Heralds [Tanka]

Photograph of Tbilisi, Georgia in the Spring with wildflowers in the fore and city as backdrop.
city landscapers
find year-round blooms for planters,
but I'll await
the wildflowers that grow
way up on the hillside.

Spring Swerve [Free Verse]

Photograph taken at Jvari Pass in the Republic of Georgia as a rain cloud works up the valley. The previous day, it had snowed.
Spring can swerve.

White patches,
holdouts from yesterday's snow,
are melted by today's rains.

Buds no sooner form
than are encased in ice.

No self-respecting Summer
day could bring snow.

Winter won't hatch
a butterfly.

Autumn can't turn
a red leaf back to green.

But Spring can swerve.

Shades of Green [Haiku]

sunlit garden
to distant mountains —
every shade of green.

Ripples [Haiku]

through a window:
first ripples of a Spring rain
seen on a pond.

Green Hills [Lyric Poem]

So many hills I have seen
That grow so soft and thick and green.
Though jagged rocks sit down below
The grass and shrubs and weeds that grow
Through cracks and gaps, in mud patches --
Sprawling wide from tight-knit batches
That stone cannot constrain or kill.

Bald Mountain [Haiku]

Spring rains stalk up
behind a bald mountain;
a brown flood flows.

Ripple Chaos [Haiku]

raindrops ripple paddy water; 
wavelets wrap into grain stalks.

Mud [Haiku]

Spring rain for days:
grass is green & thick;
the mud, soft & thin.

“Inspired by Late Spring” by Ye Cai [w/ Audio]

Sparrows cast on my desk their shadows in pair,
And willow down falls in my inkstone here and there.
Sitting by the window, I read the Book of Change,
Not knowing when has Spring gone, I only feel strange.

Note: This is the joint translation of Xu Yuanchong and Xu Ming found in the Golden Treasury of Quatrains and Octaves (a Bilingual edition of 千家诗 “Thousands of Poems”) on which they collaborated (i.e. China Publishing Group: Beijing (2008) p. 40)