Ribbons Spring/Summer 2017: Volume 13, Number 2
a soft rain falls
as you work in the garden …
what I’d give to read
the chapters of your life
you never share
Category Archives: meditative poetry
In Memoriam: Maya Lyubenova
Last year I posted a request in a Face Book haiku/tanka writing group asking if anyone had a photo of Lily of the Valley that they were willing to share and allow me to use for a piece of tankart I was working on. A very quick response from the poet/photographer Maya Lyubenova gave me the perfect picture. I never really knew Maya. We’d never met, and we chatted only a few times on FaceBook in poetry groups and on Face Book Messenger. I was certainly a real fan of hers. Bulgarian by birth, Maya could compose gorgeous haiku in English. She could also pair her poems with her equally exquisite photographs to create haiga — visual poetry of the highest quality. I was touched by her generosity in allowing me to use the photo she had sent.
Only recently did I learn that Maya Lyubenova had passed away on December 30, 2016. Like so many, I mourn her loss as a person and as a poet and artist. I wish I had known her better, but I cannot change that. Her work still remains for us to look at, to study, to learn from and to be dazzled by … that will not end.
I’d like to dedicate my piece of tankart to Maya Lyubenova — our single connected piece of art. Thank you, Maya, for bringing so much beauty into this world. May you rest in peace.
Maya Lyubenova’s website:
http://mayalyubenova.wixsite.com/maya-lyubenova
The link to her amazing haiga:
http://mayalyubenova.wixsite.com/maya-lyubenova/haiga
Cloud watching (a haiga)
Published in Prune Juice, A Journal of Senryu, Kyoka,
Haibun and Haiga, Issue 22, July 2017
Trying hard to hold on … (two tanka)
Red Lights, Volume 13, No. 2, June 2017
peeling an orange
in one long strand –
trying hard to hold on
to all I remember
of those now gone
a wooden pew
empty and waiting . . .
colored light
from stained glass
cupped in my hands
My thanks to editor and poet, Marilyn Hazelton, who published these tanka in the most excellent Red Lights.
Winter garden (a haiku)
This haiku is my first poem in the journal, Modern Haiku.
.
winter garden–
a lone crab apple
holds fast
Modern Haiku
Volume 48:1
Winter-Spring 2017
Just past sunrise . . . 4 small poems
Two of my haiku and two tanka were published in Blithe Spirit, Journal of the British Haiku Society, Volume 27, No. 2, 2017:
autumn morning—
sweeping away all
that drifts inside
washed up
in the sudden flood –
a baby’s shoe
just past sunrise
a single scull
glides down the river. . .
a flash of what it was
to be young
the tight cord slaps
against the flagpole
all night long
I dream of a father
who used few words
My thanks to Shrikaanth Krishnamurthy, the editor of Blithe Spirit, for selecting these four poems for publication.
A Poet in Time 