Spring
*
Surprise!
Above the yellow-feathered forsythia
a blue-eyed moon
*
Sun by sun
the city’s silver-plated river
sheds its carapace
*
Vanishing point
Morning frost sublimes to air
with not a bead of dew
*
Unfruitful cherry
Your florid sacrifice ignites
a wintry heart
*
Tale of Importunate Dust:
today’s sneezing fit
tomorrow’s new grass
*
Whose carrion musings
mock the mellifluous hive?
Buzz-crazy flies
*
So brash so loud so brief:
how song-centered flocks
defy the destined cull
*
Lightning’s afterimage
Distant thunder —
Twin idioms of haiku.
Summer
INFERNAL HEAT FRIES
INTERNAL CIRCUIT-BREAKER
Suicide By Cop
*
Another siren
scratches an invisible name
on night’s black hood
*
drip drip upstairs drip drip
neighbor’s drip drip AC drip drip drip
drip drip
*
Rainwashed-denim sky
The scalloped fans of ginkgos preen
in a soft breeze
*
Farm-market guilt
A glut of peaches
indelibly consigned to rot
*
Litter-eating pigeons
churn each peck
into living iridescence
*
Wind so dry
leaves sizzle like cicadas
On the horizon pink smoke
*
Weather Advisory from The Waste Land:
To Break Heat Wave
Cue Sanskrit.
Autumn
*
Hectic rust-red quarantine yellow …
the death of leaves
the health of trees
*
From a thinning wedge of sun
the season’s razor pares
its daily slice
*
Pandemical-poetical-no-borders bug
– Haiku?
– Gesundheit!
*
TV storm-tracker
All the death and devastation
minus the mess
*
On chill Chelsea streets
young fashionistas bare
their fall-denying plunge
*
The loons are long gone
Where the lakeside path turns home
twigs snap like old bones
*
A late V of geese arrows south
Dusk takes their cold cries
The smell of snow
*
Hard wind rakes the stubble
Snug behind walls of silo and self
seeds bide.
Winter
*
A seamless blurring cleaves
the old year’s last storm
the new year’s first blizzard
*
Sunday morning snow in the street
weather-sealed windows
Triple stillness
*
Through milk-slick sidewalk ice
rock salt bores a fleet filigree
Ars brevis
*
blood runs cold Apt metaphor
of fear made flesh too weak
for spirit’s will
*
Season of second thoughts
Under zipped-up heat
a layer of regret
*
On …
The glower of electric fire
without a lick of flame …Off
*
My latest hibernation fail —
an unhealthy lust
for the sun’s touch
*
What Shelley never taught:
The longer the wait
the warmer the welcome.
***
Gerald Jonas is a senior editor at WhoWhatWhy and a writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times, as well as other journals large and small.
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