an open field

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

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

Martin Lucas, editor of Haiku Presence magazine and author of Stepping Stones, a way into haiku  has kindly allowed me to reprint his enlightening essay. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, for the way it makes me reflect on my own haiku writing practice and question what I'm doing and why. Haiku as Poetic Spell Haiku as an English-language form now has fifty years or so of history. There have been many trials of new approaches along the way, and much has been learned. At the same time, it’s probably true to say that only a minority of writers stay the course. For many, it’s an enthusiasm that burns brightly for two or three years – sometimes with brilliant results – and then burns itself out, as the writer comes to feel that s/he has exhausted either the potential of haiku or his/her own potential as a haiku writer. One consequence of this turnover is that although individual writers may make great strides very rapidly, the movement as a whole evolves much more slowly, a...