fresh snow on the roof
--- a squirrel
plows through it

outside, I snack on
Bridgehead's seed cookie
--- some sparrows do too

six twenty a.m. ---
cawing crows
harsh my mellow

grocery shopper
likes orangutans ---
boycotts margarine

-- Sunnyside Troll

Check out: https://www.facebook.com/SAVEOrangutans/

the cheerful call
of the pine warbler ---
it makes my day!

the loon descends,
descends, descends,
descends ---- splash!

"KEEP OFF THE GRASS"
--- a robin
disregards the sign

geese flying north
the pitcher stops his windup
to watch

-- American poet & co-editor of "Baseball Haiku"

I love eating
tofu and fruits
and I am a baby

my shadow is cast
--- alarmed,
pond carp swim away

the lineman works ---
the cross squirrel
chatters at him

Not quite haiku
Yet the effect
Is similar

I, myself, believe that they are haiku. Here's why:

"Trying to write haiku in seventeen syllables in English often results in using unnecessary words to fill out the count. Such words will destroy a haiku, which depends on concision and suggestibility for its effect. [The Japanese count syllables differently than we do --- they count shorter elements, onji, as "syllables." The word "haiku," for example, is three onji, while we count it as two syllables. Ten to fourteen syllables equal the time duration of seventeen Japanese onji] -- excerpt from pages xv & xvi of 'Baseball Haiku,' edited by Nanae Tamura & Cor van den Heuvel

@Ger Jonker Interesting! Now that you mention it, I might have read someplace that true haiku may use fewer syllables than Westerners suppose. I personally find it hard to be that concise.

A Narrow Fellow in the Grass
-by Emily Dickinson


A Narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides --
You may have met Him -- did you not
His notice sudden is --

The Grass divides as with a Comb --
A spotted shaft is seen --
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on --

He likes a Boggy Acre
A floor too cool for Corn --
Yet when a Boy, and barefoot --
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Upbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone --

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me --
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality --

But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone --

Cat gone 24 hours
- A piece of his hair
Waving on the door

- Jack Kerouac
(King of the Beats),
American novelist & poet
(1922 - 1969)

The racket of the starlings
In the trees --
My cat's back

- Jack Kerouac

Chicken in a Cage


I - 'm inside
N - o room,
S - uffering with
A - ss wounds,
N - o beak,
I - nhumane torture
T - raumatizes me.
Y - are you doing this?

-- SunnysideTroll

The name of the American poet who wrote this is: Cor van den Heuvel

the player takes
his position in the outfield
a cricket's cry


-- Mizuhara Shuoshi (1892 -1981)

walking home
with his glove on his head
shrieking cicadas


-- Imai Sei

during
the pitching change
cicadas


-- Dave McCullough

I started feeling a little guilty about posting Imai Sei's haiku shortly after I posted it. I was feeling guilty because I am vegan and baseball gloves are usually made out of leather. Then I started to wonder if leather-free baseball gloves exist. Woohoo! Apparently they do.


Check out: https://www.peta.org/living/personal...-gloves-exist/

I screwed up the punctuation in Sunnyside Troll's poem, "Chicken in a Cage". Therefore, I am going to post it again. This time though, I'll add a youtube video at the end of it to show viewers what the debeaking process on a factory farm looks like.




Chicken in a Cage



I - 'm inside.
N - o room.
S - uffering with
A - ss wounds,
N - o beak.
I - nhumane torture
T - raumatizes me.
Y - are you doing this?


by Sunnyside Troll

if you'd like to watch the video in the previous post, then just click on "You Tube" in the olive green rectangle above the video.

the river flows by ---
I think of my wife
and write this poem:

You are my... QUACK!
Oh no! A duck
is interrupting. --

nostrils flaring...
the ibex decides
we're no threat


-- Polona Oblak

workday done
my mood consumed
by the koi pond

- Ben Moeller-Gaa

three thirty a.m. ---
the mouse in the wall
disturbs my slumber