a videohaiku and linked verse collection
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Sixteen videohaiku and a nine-verse renku made between June and September, 2019. As with the preceding collections, Winter Trees and Pennsylvania Spring, the texts were prompted largely by the footage and exist in dialogue with it; the videos themselves are the poems, not the transcript below, which I include for the benefit of the visually impaired. The main difference this time is the inclusion of a stand-alone linked verse sequence called “Sea levels” about the submerged forest on the coast of Wales near Borth, which I decided to leave in since it does relate to videohaiku that precede and follow it.
(text)
Grand Union Canal
your city has so
many souls
*
commuter train
all the fingers stroking
immobile phones
*
cows on the common
the universal language
of grief
*
summer sidewalk
shopping trolley
rehearsing for the Rapture
*
Eid in the park
the Arabic
of rain
*
jackdaw in residence
working with
found materials
*
dog walking
the slant rhymes
of our shadows
*
midnight snail
the twenty-six hundred teeth
on its tongue
*
British Museum
bury me with a bronze
selfie stick
*
Old Oak Common
safety helmets must be worn
in the hellmouth area
*
small town parade
the darkness enclosed
by papier-mâché
*
sheepshape
lawn grazing
robot
*
funicular
keeping our distance
counterpoised
*
Sea levels
low tide
we comb the ancient peat
for footprints
drowned forest
the gull’s cry turns eldritch
undead stumps
4000 years later
sprout bladderwrack
our shared excitement
at scraps of root-bark
seaside town
all the colors of ice cream
against the Atlantic
the high street is already
lower than the beach
Tisha B’Av just past
Orthodox Jewish families
stroll the sea wall
land marks us
sea levels us
beneath the waves
we are saying hello
and goodbye
*
steel band
the oil drums
that drive us
*
summer dusk
the condensation of city
into lights
*
climate strike
making her own sign to feel
like a kid again