Celebrate our love Frolic late into the night Rainy Saturday
Since our anniversary fell on a Wednesday, Shawn and I did not go out to dinner until the weekend. I’ve been wanting to check out Barrio Queen in Avondale for a while and we finally had a good excuse. Then we went over to a friend’s house for a combined birthday and anniversary celebration.
Barrio Queen Avondale Oct 15, 2022
Toast – Salud Oct 15, 2022
This week one of my haiku is included in the Haiku Pea podcast – S5E20 In Depth. Thanks to Patricia for her continued hard work, sharing her love and knowledge of haiku.
My loyal readers will notice I wrote about the palo verde again. I do love how every April the green tree blooms yellow flowers of course the clean up is not so fun.
Backyard trees grow tall to offer shade throughout the spring and summer Children play digging their way to China before vacation ends Palo Verde – green stick bursting with yellow flowers in April
Palo Verde in backyard
NaPoWriMo Prompt– In a prompt originally posted this past February, Poets & Writers directs us to an essay by Urvi Kumbhaton the use of mangoes in diasporic literature. As she discusses in her essay, mangoes have become a sort of shorthand or symbol that writers use to invoke an entire culture, country, or way of life. This has the beauty of simplicity – but also the problems of simplicity, in that you really can’t sum up a culture in a single image or item, and you risk cliché if you try.
But at the same time, the “staying power” of the mango underscores the strength of metonymy in poetry. Following Poets & Writers’ prompt, today I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that invokes a specific object as a symbol of a particular time, era, or place.
Good morning and welcome to day twenty two of #NaPoWriMo. I’m not exactly sure if I’m on prompt but when I read it last night the palo verde came to mind. Gretchen wrote a lovely poem about sitting in the backyard for her poetry class and the professor commented that her shade was generic and could be anywhere. I told her we have a lovely palo verde tree in the backyard, if you mention the tree by name he can’t fault you for being generic. So I think having a palo verde tree in my poem invokes a specific place. Also Gretchen and I were sitting in the backyard yesterday and it was very windy. I told her, you could have yellow flowers raining down on you in your poem. She wasn’t particularly impressed with that; Yellow flowers are shitting on us. Well okay (yes it was very windy) but I told her that’s not very poetic.
The middle part of my poem is a memory of when Robin and a friend dug a big hole in our backyard one summer. Pretty much in the same locale as Speedy’s summer residence. I’m not sure if their goal was to reach China, but I remember as a kid thinking it was a possibility if one dug straight down through the center of the Earth. Robin’s friend just thought it was cool they were allowed to dig in the dirt. The other reason for this poem besides trying the sijo form again is I told Gretchen yesterday I write poems about the backyard every April but haven’t written one yet this year. Oversight corrected Lol! If you read the link to my previous backyard oasis poem, I talk about how they are getting snow in April back east. Yesterday I saw all the lovely snow pictures from Buffalo. If you ask me that would be the proper usage for shitting on us.
Destructive monsoon
Creates hurricane force winds
Treetop tips over
I posted how the haboob Monday night took the top off our tree in the front. Because the bottom branches are thick, the tree caught itself. Probably a good thing, as it tipped towards the driveway and may have landed on top of Rachael’s car if the bottom branches weren’t there. Well Tuesday Rachael was off from work, so we went out to do back to school shopping; and wow there was a lot of storm damage to clean up. I called a tree company on Wednesday; they could not picture how the tree could catch itself. I told them there is no rush. The tree isn’t blocking the road and there is no other damage. Thursday morning they came out to look at it. Unfortunately they are very busy and can’t get to it for awhile plus Shawn did not like the price. So the top of the tree is still dangling from the top.
Then last night the West Valley was hit with another intense monsoon storm. An entire house out near Buckeye was destroyed. When I noticed the wind picking up, I told Rachael to move the car out of the driveway. The above picture was taken today, so the storm last night did not create any more damage to the tree. Hopefully Shawn can get it trimmed up tomorrow. The #haikuchallenge word today is tip. I knew this would be a perfect photo to go with my haiku. Monsoon season really likes to show off in August. This was the same paloverde tree last year (the photo on right; wall was in neighborhood but not our property).
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