A Glint of Light on Broken Glass: A Zuihitsu

crescent moon
reclining on clouds
the maple stands alone

Raising my cup, I entice the moon; her reflection of you and me make us three. Bathed in moonlight, I wash in each scent you left behind. Baptized in them, I become born-again, a poet speaking in tongues.

faint mist, gloomy clouds
sorrow surrounds the day
who can take a poem
beyond the Pacific
a calligraphy of geese
flies against the sky

Snowflakes seed the sky in silence. The loneliness gnawing at the corner of my heart grows louder.

I go out the window.

September/October 2010 issue of Sketchbook

Confessions of a Struggling Writer: A Zuihitsu

drunk on moonlight from Taipei I stand alone under the Ajax sky.

My heart is depressed, my poetry schizophrenic, but nonetheless, my hand is normal, and I am a writer.

a Taipei key

opens the door
of Ajax twilight

I pursue my poem
throughout the night
put it down on paper

Writing tanka: four lines sound perfect, yet I struggle to write a fifth to perfect my tanka.

my anguish
crumbled into a ball
I continue to write
as the wastebasket waits
for one more throw

Sunlight drifts through the window and settles again on the worn cover of my Chinese-English dictionary.

My heart is a lonely hunter seeking the place where the odor of words is strongest.

Writing poetry is an endless and always defeated effort to kill my shadow.

I am forty…something
in the attic waiting
alone
four years gone by
and yet no chapbooks

My life… a void. I hit my head with books by other poets.

Being a writer means being voluntarily mad and struggling alone with the voices whispering, we all know you’re a failed writer.

Writing is a Jobian struggle against noises -- and silence.

Sketchbook, 5:4, July/August 2010

Note:

Zuihitsu is a classical Japanese poetic form derived from the Chinese literary tradition that employed random thoughts, diary entries, reminiscence, and poetry. The first book of zuihitsu in English is The Narrow Road to the Interior written by a Japanese-American poet, Kimiko Hahn who received the 2008 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry