Carpe Diem – Margaret Chula’s “following my footprints” – August 19, 2015

pretty pink fan
gift of an artist
cheery blossoms

early summer
rolling daikon in sushi
sticky business

hot bancha
the shiatsu master sips
telling jokes

even the old tatami
frays along the edges
years of memories

Written for:

Carpe Diem Modern Times Haiku #2 Margaret Chula’s “following my footprints”

“Margaret Chula (born in 1947) lived in Japan for twelve years where she taught English and creative writing at universities in Kyoto. Her books include Grinding my ink (Haiku Society of America Book Award); This Moment; Shadow Lines (with Rich Youmans); Always Filling, Always Full; and The Smell of Rust. Her newest collection, What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment Camps, a seven-year collaboration with quilt artist Cathy Erickson, includes poems in the voices of Japanese Americans interned during World War II. She has published poems in Prairie Schooner, Kyoto Journal, Poet Lore, America’s Review, and Runes, as well as in numerous haiku journals around the world. One of her haiku appears on Itoen tea bottles sold in stores and vending machines throughout Japan. Her one-woman performance of Japanese women poets (“Three Women Who Loved Love”), premiered in Krakow, Poland in 2003 and toured to Canada, Japan, and the U.S.”

By Chèvrefeuille

following my footprints
of fifty years ago
those endless summers

this early heat
a carp arches
into the raindrops

in strawmat raincoats
farmers plant rice
their boots croaking

returning
the borrowed umbrella
splattered with blossoms