an open field

Since January 2020 all my work - haiku writing, poetry, prose, imaginative and non-fiction writing - has been posted on my website   Lynne Rees .  Please feel free to share anything from this archive, or my main site, but I'd be grateful if you could credit me as the writer and link back to the source.  Thank you 🙏 Lynne 

deeper shadows where the walls meet... autumn rain – Mark E. Brager, The Heron's Nest, Volume XXI, Number 3 (2019) I imagine a corner, two walls meeting at right angles. I can see the depth of shadow there. If I reach out, I am sure the surface – rough brick or smooth masonry – will be cooler; perhaps because the autumn rain I now notice has started to fall. The places where people meet are more emotionally complex, stepping, as we may have to, from the comfort of the familiar to the challenge of the unfamiliar. Those “deeper shadows” may be rich with empathy and gratitude. Eshadows in corners Photograph by Steven Castledinequally, they may be fraught with conflict and umbrage. Brager’s haiku shifts me from inanimate objects to human experience. I sense loss through the image of “autumn rain,” or at least an understanding, or acceptance, of inevitable change that results in something being left behind. Perhaps change, even for the better, always leaves a ...

early snow whether I am ready or not the silence  Published in  Human/Kind July 2019 Journal of Topical & Contemporary Japanese Short Forms & Art

sunrise barred light on the walls of the deportation centre tinywords May 2019

In memory of … a grasshopper leaps from stone to stone Sometimes the dead speak to us: this morning Facebook unearthed a seven year old message from a friend who died two years ago. Now here I am, interrupting a run to snap ox-eye daisies from the hedgerow and lay them on a rabbit knocked to the side of the road, as fresh and neat as sleep. Flowers for what is lost: the voice of a friend, the beat of a heart. For the shrinking perimeters of my father’s mind. The last time I said goodbye he lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it.   Presence 63, March 2019

hitting sixty I throw another chilli in the home-made stew Runner up in the Anam Cara Haiku Competition May 2019

There’s only a portal of black obsidian between the zombies and lava in The Dimension of The Nether and The Overworld where Steve is standing and I am counting his sheep, cows and pigs. But we really shouldn’t be hanging around when night is about to fall and mob attacks are imminent: Blazes and Creepers, Spiders from The Cave, all ready to descend on The Farm.  autism spectrum my nephew names all the monsters It’s time to lock up the animals, he says, time to close doors and windows, so I turn Steve around and notice he’s clutching a tiny baguette, something that fills me with unaccountable joy: that in this world of sharp edges and danger a boy has placed Bread in a man’s hands and they are carrying it home.  Presence 63,  March 2019

... past standing stones, invisible tombs, the path Chaucer's pilgrims took across the North Downs, the stone cold dead in churchyards, listening to the sound my feet make on lanes, on mud and stone, sharing my breath, the thump of my heartbeats, with sheep, the sky, fields. Sometimes I wonder how I got here, what propelled me forward to this moment when the snags of fleece along a wire fence shine with glory, when another rise in the track ahead is an inspiration not a defeat.  And I think of the words, 'yes', and, 'you can', and the centuries of people before me who said them out loud, or quietly to themselves, believing that something could change. And here I am changing almost nothing in the world and still feeling better for it. trail run seeing the wood  and the trees Blithe Spirit 29.1 - 2019

even amongst all this grey light

Into the dark My father cannot name a single animal for the memory nurse. No farm or wild animal. Not even the simplicity of dog or cat or any of the fish he used to catch. I imagine them circling the dark auditorium of his brain – sheep, lion, tiger, trout – a silent carousel refusing to yield to the roll of his tongue.   Parkinson’s dementia a blackbird almost invisible in the winter's dusk First published Haibun Today Vol 13 No 1, March 2019

moon in the trees me and the blackbird singing

my mother cries on the other end of the phone hard rain

Remember. Imagine. I know the smoke and steam of industry. Tall chimneys, the cordons of terraced houses. Shift changes: men in caps and thick jackets leaving or returning home in the dark. The cover of Frances Angela’s new chapbook, Philip Street , evokes these memories of my hometown in South Wales. I recall the streets named for landowners, builders and benefactors. Remember the kids we were warned against playing with …   they didn’t like me playing with patsy o’malley they said her family were thieves and rogues [i] And there was the library too: the library just for the smell [ii] I know that smell: dust, polish, paper.   But then my childhood path diverges from the one that unfolds in the subsequent pages: a children’s home, a catechism class, whiskey. This is not my story. Yet somehow, it is my story, the one I imagine, the one I experience through my senses… pub night the dark heap of mother’s clothes [iii] … and through empathy...

good days bad days always the light at our feet

sunday morning the light beyond the church window

‘What’s the word for the sky in your house?’ my granddaughter asked as I was putting her to bed.  ‘The sky in my house?’ And I looked up towards the ceiling, imagined the open space above it, between floor joists and the roof’s wooden rafters, and I saw what she was seeing, saw it confined there as if it had forgotten to move before we’d converted the derelict barn to a home. ‘Ah, the attic,’ I said.  Fifteen years later I live in a house with no attic and sometimes I stare at the sky and wonder about all that time it was living with me and I hadn’t known.   In his Afterword to The Wonder Code Scott Mason asks, ‘… where does wonder begin?’  And answers, ‘I believe it begins with a sense of discovery.’  discover (v.)   from the Old French  descovrir,  which meant, satisfyingly in the above context, to unroof, and also to unveil, to reveal.   We discover things when we lift the veils of self-importance, fear, ...

Sometimes life and poetry intersect naturally. I had a brutal wardrobe clear-out yesterday, as witnessed by the pile of clothes hangers in the centre of the bed and a bulging large carrier bag destined for the charity shop.  And then, through one of those random extended internet excavations, I came across this haiku by  Annette Makino , published by  tinywords  a few years ago which I'd commented on briefly.  hanging in my closet the person I used to be Reading it again still elicited a similar variety of responses: laughter, recognition, resignation and sadness. And this time part of ‘the person I used to be’ was neatly folded at my feet!  Most of us keep clothes that no longer fit us, or suit us. I still have an ostentatious, ostrich feather bolero that I bought in the early 1980s and will never wear again but hold onto from a sense of nostalgia. But the haiku also propels me towards imagining clothes that belonged to someone else, a...

Haiku Rebellion Studio, The Poetry School, London, April 2018

haiku how many become one sound of rain           — Jacob Salzer , Frogpond 38.3 I have a particular fondness for line-break – perhaps because I came to haiku from writing free-verse where line-break is the principal structuring tool. But it’s still something that matters to me in constructing haiku, although I approach it with a lighter touch to avoid any overly dramatic effect that a longer poem might be able to carry and dilute. And it was the idea of line-break that immediately hit me when I first read Salzer’s haiku, on the page and out loud… the idea that the haiku would work as well without any: how many become one sound of rain The haiku’s theme of oneness, alongside the option for the reader to pause in multiple places to play with the sense of what Salzer is saying, make it perfect for the monostich form. BUT… that’s not what Salzer chose to do so instead of simply imposing myself on the poem I want to look deeper and appreciate the a...

the sky's blue gong an orange in my hand           　　　　　　　　　　— Peter Yovu I don’t think Yovu could have packed any more into this haiku. Colour and sound.  The human experience and the natural world. Distance and proximity. And the beautiful simplicity of concrete language that injects it with vibrancy and authenticity and communicates an experience we can all recognise and share.  Add to that the use of colour as adjective and noun, the onomatopoeia of ‘gong’ and the almost-eye rhyme with ‘orange’, as well as the monostich form that encourages us to experience this moment in one celebratory hurrah, and this is a haiku that makes me feel good to be alive on this day in the world. A day when that orange could almost be the sun sitting in my own small palm.