THE BELLS TOLL (photo) & FEAR OF WATER (two-part memory & dreamku series) by Roswila

FEAR OF WATER

The Childhood Memory

day and night the sump
pump thumps in the background
and for just a while
longer the ground beneath our
homes will not cave in

in the meantime
each set of parents finds ways
to cover up or
camouflage huge cracks in
their apartment’s plaster walls

most heave tall shelves
in front of the worst and fill them up
with books and chachki --
I am quietly proud of my
own parents’ unique solution:

floor to ceiling drapes
in wide vertical white
and charcoal stripes
that coordinate with the
living room’s basic color scheme

fully close the drapes
and the windows, too, are
hidden well away --
both the cracking and the long view,
out of sight, out of mind


The Dream

hiking on wooded trails
transmogrophies into cautious
stepping down a boardwalk
the planks clearly old, color
leached out by sun and rain

shifts beneath my feet
slow my pace even more as
the narrow walkway
extends way out over water
away from the woods

uncertainty prompts
a turnaround but then there’s
no room to pass by
a smiling old woman
standing on the pathway

we laugh about our
predicament, neither of us
lithe enough anymore
to clamber around the
other on this narrow perch

she suddenly sinks
downwards – oh no – has she jumped
off as the only
solution? then I see she’s
sitting on a low shelf

I join her at the edge
we dangle our feet side by side
in the water


[two part series: a childhood memory (The Childhood Memory) brought up by drafting the dreamku (The Dream) on a dream of 6-16-12. I had thought to post an old poem I recently revised that’s specifically about my father since it is Father’s Day. However, I can rarely resist posting my newest dreamku. So I’ll add here that there's much I am grateful for and miss about my Dad. P.S. "Chachki" is the more common spelling of the Yiddish word "tchotchke" meaning figurines and other sorts of trinkets. The neighborhood we were living in was largely Jewish and is where I first picked up some Yiddish. Though I have to admit I just learned today on googling to be sure of those spellings, that both are plural. Photo “The Bells Toll” by Roswila]

PLEASE NOTE that I never have nor do I now lay claim to having been the first to suggest writing about our dreams in the haiku form. In fact, the haijin (Haiku Masters of centuries ago) sometimes wrote haiku on dreams. But even more importantly, what I have been developing for several years now on this blog is not even truly haiku or tanka or monoku. The ways in which I have been using and experimenting with these forms makes the results more akin to kissing cousins of these small Eastern poetry forms. Therefore, I mostly use the term "dreamku" to distinguish what I do from those traditional forms. Click here for a more in-depth INTRODUCTION than follows below, including links to my THREE PART PRIMER on the basic (most haiku-like) dreamku form.

Also, the photo accompanying a daily dream poem or non-dream based poem is not necessarily meant to illustrate it, but to reflect some small, even slant aspect of the verse -- similar to Japanese haiga (illustrated haiku). I've also recently realized that although the dreamku (i.e. dream based poems) posted here tend not to have metaphor or simile, the accompanying photos almost always act as such.

To write a metaphor or simile into a dream scenario is something I rarely do. It can be confusing: did it really look like a hand, say, in the dream, or am I just being poetic to make my conscious point? As these dreamku act as a dream journal, my over-riding tendency is to try to stay close to the actual dream scenario itself. Admittedly making for a tendency to less "poetic" dreamku. Then why pay attention to any haiku, tanka, or monoku parameters at all when writing about my dreams? Because I find in even attempting to adhere to them I'm making choices that relieve my dream recall of a great deal of chatter so that I can get down to some important dream aspects. Here's a link to THE AREN'TS OF DREAMKU & ACCOMPANYING PHOTOS in which I go into some of the basic parameters for dreamku and the photos chosen to go with them (and with any non-dream based poems I post here, as well).

The archives in the sidebar hold years of the daily dreamku, tanka, monoku and photo posts I've made, grouped in one post by month. As I no longer post dreamku (or non-dream based poems) strictly daily, each post will appear below and then in the archives by the day on which it was posted.

There are many other sorts of posts here, not all dream-based. I indicate which are about or influenced by dreams. Some non-dream focused posts are book reviews, "regular" poems (some by other writers than myself), scifaiku, writing exercises, Tarot haiku, photos, haiga, and so on. However, most of those are in much older posts. There's a listing by month going back to early 2006 in the sidebar.

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‘til next time, keep dreaming,

[aka: Patricia Kelly]
**** If you wish to copy or use any of my writing or poems, please email me for permission (under “View my complete profile”) **** My other blogs: ROSWILA’S TAROT GALLERY & JOURNAL; ROSWILA’S TAIGA TAROT; and OPENING TO THE LIGHT ****