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The Renku Sessions: Triparshva—call for verse 5

renku_300

Welcome to the third Renku Session. I’m Linda Papanicolaou, and I’ll be leading this journey in collaborative poetry. Triparshva is a 22-verse form developed by Norman Darlington in 2005. It’s a good form for composing online because it moves more quickly than the 36-verse kasen, while also following the jo-ha-kyu (beginning-development-rapid closure) pattern of traditional renku. So whether you’re new to renku, or simply want to keep your skills honed, you’re especially encouraged to join us.

Our Renku So Far: 

Once again I enjoyed reading everyone’s ideas.  If you’ve used a topic checklist (two from Japanese renku clubs are published in Kondô & Higginson’s “Link and Shift” article), you’ll see that the offerings range through many of the categories.  A few are ineligible for various reasons.  In a couple of offers, summer sneaked in, though season wasn’t intrusive this time.  There were other problems, though.  In some of the offers (notably those with sound imagery) there was a whiff of linking to the maeku in a way that reverts to or recalls the uchikoshi.  This is called kannonbirakione of my favorite renku words. It refers to a shrine with double doors that open symmetrically outwards.  In a few other verses, echoes of imagery in the hokku also crept in here and there.  No matter—even when we’re vigilant these things happen.

More seriously, a number of offers have been travel verses, proper nouns, and a very interesting literary reference to a poem about infant death. Creative energy is being spent on verses that we can’t use this early in the renku, so I’ll say a bit more about jo-ha-kyu. It might be useful to know why I place the verses I do while passing over others that seem worthy in and of themselves.

In the call for hokku, I advised that the jo as like the early stages of a party when we’re all still greeting each other and conversation is polite. That was a simplification so as not to burden everyone with rules and proscriptions while we were just starting off. Actually, there’s a defined role for each side of the renku. For the jo this involves avoiding topics such as death, war, religion, illness, lamentation, love (meaning sex), and proper nouns. Though travel and proper nouns might seem arbitrary, Carley explains that travel was a grueling enterprise in the Edo period, while the specificity of names and places can disrupt the flow of the poem. The idea is that jo be a place where participants “establish their presence” and “the reader is likewise eased in” (JEC, “A Dynamic Pattern: pacing with jo-ha-kyu,” Renku Reckoner pp. 89-91).

Another factor in the choice of verses is wider context within the poem.  You may know Ferris Gilli’s paper “English Grammar: Variety in Renku,” delivered at a seminar which Paul organized for the World Haiku Club in 2000 (online at WHR Archives).  If so, you know the importance of variety in renku. Variety goes beyond grammar and syntax, though. I assume you also know or participated the discussion on point of view that took place during the previous renku, which Sandra has copied to the Forums. Certain types of scent linking deal with this, too, but we’ll get into linking techniques later.

With three verses placed, our renku has developed a trajectory.  Hokku, wakiku and daisan are nicely varied in syntax; all three are shasei that segue from one to the next through descriptive imagery and clear linking. While other sabakis may lead differently, my own sense after reading all your ideas is that verse 4 is the optimal time to pull things together not with another shasei but a first-person verse that leads us deeper into mood through personal response.  Of the two or three intriguing offers that went in this direction. I’ve selected Barbara Taylor’s. I hope you like it as much as I do.  Its mood of gentle nostalgia brings in fresh energy that’s just right for the slot.  See how it colors the maeku with a layer of memory, ties the progression together, and prepares us nicely for the moon verse that comes next!

a bowl of cherries
sitting on each white plate
someone’s name
~Lynne Rees

under a canvas tent
the snap of a breeze
~Barbara Kaufmann

passersby stop
to applaud a subway
saxophone player
– Karen Cesar

sweet reminiscences
of our bygone days
~Barbara A. Taylor

Onward to verse 5—the moon

The moon appears twice in triparshva, in an autumn run on the second side, and here in the jo, where our schema says it may be either winter or spring,   It’s important to understand that moon is a kigo and your verse will be autumn by default unless you clearly show we’re in a different season.  You may find these resources helpful for inspiration:

  • “Moon and related links”, World Kigo Database
  • “Full moon names and their meanings,” Farmer’s Almanac (cold moon, long night’s moon, wolf moon, snow moon. . . )
  • “Moon”, from Fay Aoyagi, “Dissection of the Haiku Tradition: Ten Short Essays on Japanese Kigo,” (originally published in Frogpond, archived online at  NZPS and  THF).

Specifications for the verse are

  • Three lines, uncut
  • Either winter or spring (your choice)
  • After two person verses, it’s time to go back to non-person.
  • Let this one be purely nature in its imagery.
  • Again, here are your maeku and uchikoshi:

passersby stop
to applaud a subway
saxophone player

sweet reminiscences
of our bygone days

Link to the maeku; shift from the uchikoshi. I think that if you just inhale the mood of the maeku and envision either winter or spring, linking will happen naturally.

How to Submit:

All verse positions in this renku will be degachi. Please post your offers in the Comments section below. Let’s have an upper limit of 3 per participant. Calls for submissions will remain open for one week, at the end of which I’ll collect everyone’s ideas, consider each and choose the one that best serves the renku.

The call for verse 4 will remain open until Monday, July 27, 2015 at midnight (EDT).

Useful links:  

  • If you’re just joining us, please take a moment to review my introductory post.
  • For the archive of previous calls and submissions, click here.
  • This renku will follow a schema by Norman Darlington. The layout for a Summer Triparshva may be found by reading down the second column from the right.

Other resources:

  • Some online saijikis (season word list):
    • Kenkichi Yamamoto, “The Five Hundred Essential Japanese Season Words,” tr. Kris Kondo and William J. Higginson, online at Renku Home (2000, updated 2005).
    • ” The Yuki Teikei Season Word List”, online at Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, 1997.
    • World Kigo Database, ed. Gabi Greve,  also includes links to a number of regional kigo lists and saijiki.
  • Online resources on linking and shifting include
    • Tadashi Shôkan Kondô and William J. Higginson, “Link and Shift: A Practical Guide to Renku Composition” at Renku Home (2005)
    • “Introduction to Renku by John Carley,” 2009, rpt. New Zealand Poetry Society (scroll down to the section “Link, Shift & Separation”).

***New and  highly recommended***

  •  John E. Carley, Renku Reckoner, ed. Norman Darlington and Moira Richards (2013, print ed. Lulu 2015), sample pages are online through Google Books.

This Post Has 109 Comments

  1. sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    — Barbara A. Taylor
    ***
    the frozen river
    with a night moon
    sliding alongside
    ***
    frozen river
    and a moon’s light
    sliding side by side

  2. .
    .
    in moonlit shadow
    the stealth of the neighbor’s cat
    in last night’s snowfall
    .
    .

  3. Thanks Linda for accepting my verse. Also, thanks to Betty and Lorin.

    For fun:

    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    *
    taken aback
    by two smoking Santas
    in the full moon

    *

    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    *
    in the moonlit paddock
    high-jumping lambs
    with wagging tails

  4. It hope this is ok: I’m changing a word in my 2nd offer —

    far too early
    for wisteria to bud,
    yet the horned moon

    (that ‘but’ was annoying me)

    – Lorin

  5. sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    ~ Barbara A. Taylor
    ~ ° ~

    just a hint of moon
    and still the groundhog
    sees his shadow

  6. passersby stop
    to applaud a subway
    saxophone player

    – Karen Cesar

    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    ~Barbara A. Taylor

    the cat in the hat
    comes back
    with the misty moon

    – Lorin

      1. Thanks very much, Lynne. (I like it best of my 3 offers, too 🙂 )


        After the formality of Latin-derived terms in the two preceding verses (‘applaud’, ‘reminiscences’) setting the ‘high’ tone of those verses, and the clear, neutral tone of the hokku & wakiku before that, I felt that a change in register and of beat might be helpful in subtly advancing the flow, as we only have verses 5 & 6 to go in the jo.

        A long shot, though, perhaps … I’m aware that Linda has written, “Let this one be purely nature in its imagery.” And I can’t claim that ‘the cat in a hat’ is “purely nature” 🙂

        – Lorin

  7. passersby stop
    to applaud a subway
    saxophone player
    *
    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    *
    restless
    in the moonlight
    pregnant ewes

    *
    – Sandra Simpson

  8. passersby stop
    to applaud a subway
    saxophone player
    *
    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    *
    holding the moon,
    for a moment or two,
    a bare-branched oak

    – Sandra Simpson

  9. in this night
    even the new moon
    smell of spring

    ***

    under the cold moon
    two birdies chirp together
    to worm themselves

    ***

    under the ice moon
    Mount Fuji is shining
    more and more

  10. passersby stop
    to applaud a subway
    saxophone player
    – Karen Cesar
    *
    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    ~Barbara A. Taylor

    this rock pool
    big enough for a starfish
    and the hazy moon

  11. passersby stop
    to applaud a subway
    saxophone player
    – Karen Cesar
    *
    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    ~Barbara A. Taylor

    bathed in moonlight
    the part of the lake
    where wild ducks rest

  12. passersby stop
    to applaud a subway
    saxophone player
    – Karen Cesar
    *
    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    ~Barbara A. Taylor
    ——
    moonlight
    streams across the hoofprints
    in a withered field

  13. moonlight on
    the water reveals
    tadpoles morphing

    *
    or
    *
    moonlight on
    the water reveals
    morphing tadpolrs

  14. sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    ~ Barbara A. Taylor
    ~ ° ~
    cold crow stares
    from a branch bent low
    to the new moon
    ~ Betty Shropshire

  15. sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    ~ Barbara A. Taylor
    ~ ° ~
    cold crow
    shares his branch
    with moon rabbit
    ~ Betty Shropshire

      1. You’ve already fixed the verse, but from the “nature” aspect of it, crows are not sexually dimorphic. No way for the poet observer to know it is a male. This is true of lots of birds, but not for others such as bluebirds, turkeys, mallard ducks, etc.

        1. I do like the pairing of crow and moon rabbit. My only thought would be that it’s so brief as to be tontoism with an article only on line 2. You could relax it out a bit so the language flows naturally.
          .
          a cold crow
          shares its branch
          with the moon rabbit

          1. Hmmm…I see your point. Not a fan of beginning L1 with an ‘a’ so will use instead:
            •••
            one cold crow
            shares its branch
            with the moon rabbit
            ~ ~
            Thanks for your insights, Linda! 🙂

        2. Hi Paul! Thanks for your help…I guess with crows, it’s a matter of size since females are slightly smaller.

    1. Todd, you have a double kigo here: “pink moon” and “melting icicles”. Double kigo isn’t necessarily bad but it tends to produce an overstuffed feeling in which neither kigo is free to ring true. What if you use either one or the other, or break it into two different versions?

      1. Thanks, Linda. Since we were given the choice of either winter or spring, I deliberately choose two kigo to express the feeling of transition from one season to the next. I’ll let the haiku stand as is.

        Todd

      1. It’s not really a kigo, I guess, though it does remind one of blossom, doesn’t it? “Pink moon” (April which coincides with the warming up phases of spring up here in the northern hemisphere) comes from a calendar cycle of Native American moon names. There are a couple of websites that give them. Fun to use though I wouldn’t vouch for the reliability of the information.. I put a url to Farmer’s Almanac up top, and here’s another I’ve used:

        http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool/Astro/moon/moonnames.htm

        1. Whatever the name for the flower was in any Native American language, the derivation of the English term is interesting:

          “The old-fashioned carnation name ‘pinks’ comes from the serrated flower edges, which look as if cut with pinking shears. And the name of the color pink is said to come from these perennials, which have been popular in gardens for hundreds of years.”

          I don’t think pinking shears were part of any pre-invasion Native American tool kit. 🙂 But it’s very interesting to find out that the name of the colour, pink, is said to have its origin in these flowers.

          – Lorin

          1. Very interesting derivation! I never knew it — but I do remember my mother’s sewing box had pinking shears. I’ve also heard the flowers referred to as “pinks.” Since that was mostly their actual color I’ve never known the other meaning.

            Yet in this renku to say “pink” is to say it — and the hokku already has color, possibly two. An example I think of is that the renku already has its quota of furred, 4-footed animals (usually only one per renku poem) and I wish to describe the wildflower “wolfsbane” it butts up against the actual animal — no matter the intention of the writer.

          2. Do we have a four-footed furry yet, Paul? Thank you for spotting the kukazu (avoidance) problem with “pink” re the hokku and color. It looks like we’re entering the phase of the renku where the early verses worm into our brains through cryptomnesia, so the more eyes spotting these things the better.

            Re the flower pink, in Renaissance painting it was a symbol of marriage.

          3. yeah, Paul…I get what you mean. If we had a wolf in one verse, it might be a tad much to have the herb, wolfsbane, in another. It’s not just the name in itself, it’s that the herb was once believed to repel wolves. So that would certainly return readers to a previous verse with a wolf in it..

            But how come we can have only one four-footed, furry animal per renku, when we can have numerous verses relating to two-footed derivatives of the ape family? ” I think I could go & live with the animals”- Walt Whitman. Quite often, I’m with Walt. And a cat is not a camel.

            Much is strange, including ‘whales’ as a kigo for winter. As an Australian, I’m only too aware that the so-called ‘scientific’ whaling in the Southern Ocean by the Japanese happens in summerevery summer, (Which is far more important to me than whether a fox gets an American H-1 visa or not…yes, I received my copy of Frogpond yesterday.

            the code words
            for nationalism –
            cicada shells

            – Lorin

            – Lorin

            – Lorin

  16. Lovely verse, Barbara!
    ~°~
    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    ~ Barbara A. Taylor
    ~°~
    just old growth
    pines cradle
    the long night moon
    ~ Betty Shropshire

  17. passersby stop
    to applaud a subway
    saxophone player
    – Karen Cesar


    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    ~Barbara A. Taylor


    the silence
    when the sky
    is full of moon

    or

    light rain
    and the silence of moonlight
    in the long grass

    1. Beautiful, both of them, but the first one feels like an autumn moon and the second, modified with long grass, feels late summer. What were your thoughts?

      1. Is it the ‘silence’ making it feel autumny? Or is the suggestion of it being a full moon making it autumn? I suppose, for me, the silence suggests ‘bareness’ which for me would be winter. And the sky ‘full of moon’ doesn’t have to be a full moon.
        .
        And yes, ‘long grass’ does make it summer more than spring, though I hadn’t thought that when I wrote it. Could it be:
        .
        light rain
        and the silence of moonlight
        in the new grass
        .
        ?

        (I’m not getting notifications of any ‘replies’… so I’ll have to make sure I check back for yours. Thanks, Linda.)

  18. passersby stop
    to applaud a subway
    saxophone player

    – Karen Cesar


    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    ~Barbara A. Taylor

    far too early
    for wisteria to bud,
    but the horned moon

    – Lorin

    1. Very evocative–it moves nicely forward from the maeku, but how do you feel about the pun of “horned” with a saxophone in the uchikoshi?

      1. Hi Linda,
        Candidly, I think that reading a pun into ‘horned’ here is far-fetched, the very sort of forensic overkill that drove John Carley crazy (not literally crazy! He was perhaps the most sane person I came across in the poetry world) There’s certainly no pun intended, no intended reference to a ‘horn’ as a musical instrument.

        But since you bring it up, I imagine that horns-as-musical-instruments etc. are called such because it’s likely that the first ones were actually made from the horns of some some animal… long ago. It’d be a long stretch, though, to read eg. ‘hornless goat’ as meaning a goat without a hunting horn or the like.

        If ‘horned moon’ is a pun on ‘saxophone’ & that rules the verse out, and we apply the same logic to hypothetical cases, that would mean there could never be sheep, goats, cows, gazelles, deer etc. , a devil, (any horned animal) followed, two verses later, by any instrument from a brass band, a car (cars gave horns!) or a ship (they, too have horns!)

        I recall John giving the most ludicrous example he could think of: supposedly, someone (unnamed) claimed ‘mansion’ wasn’t acceptable because ‘pigeon’ was in the uchikoshi, and of course, both have wings!
        —-
        The reason why ‘kannonbiraki’ is to be avoided is that the flow of renku must ever go forward, it shouldn’t stagnate & it shouldn’t look backward, so no verse should draw attention back to the
        uchikoshi .

        Linda, if you think (& by naming ‘horned moon’ as a pun, it’s clear that you do think so) that ‘horned moon’ might cause some readers to “return to the uchikoshi” , and thereby disturb the forward-moving flow, that’s fine. You’re the sabaki.

        Perhaps you think of a saxophone player as a horned man? 🙂 Or as a horny man? Better stop! This could get Freudian! 🙂

        I actually had Richard Wright’s lovely haiku in the back of my mind, as well as Sandra’s bellowing bull:

        Coming from the woods,
        A bull has a lilac sprig
        Dangling from a horn.

        Now, the bull in Wright’s haiku is a French bull. Does that mean, I wonder, that this bull has French Horns? 🙂

        (ps, of course, even if Sandra rewrote her bull verse to exclude the bellowing, in the light of your ‘horned moon’/ ‘saxophone’ analogy, we couldn’t overlook the fact that bulls have horns in relation to the uchikoshi, could we?)
        —-

        cheers,

        Lorin

        1. Just asking. Yes, important to remember that aesthetics trumps pigeonholes. At first I simply read the moon image literally, as a crescent moon with point up. I see what you’re getting at.

        2. Ohhh Lorin . . .

          Groaning as I read your punning funsterism “French Horns.”

  19. passersby stop
    to applaud a subway
    saxophone player
    **

    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    **
    stirring the neighbour’s bull
    to midnight bellows,
    a petal-coloured moon

    **
    – Sandra Simpson

        1. “The bull’s name is Ferdinand?” – Linda

          Not likely. 🙂 A Kiwi bull is more likely to be named Angus MacKinnon, or something like that.

          Pity about the ‘midnight bellows’, Sandra. I like the verse a lot. Our cow Daisy used to trample the fence down and walk 3 miles up the road to visit her bull of choice, and break into his paddock the same way. We’d get the phone call in the morning, with the owner (jokingly) threatening to charge the sire fee.

          – Lorin

          1. The bull on the neighbouring property to my brother’s farm always sounds off on a moonlit night, doesn’t have to be full. He settles down eventually. Makes a change to the cityscape night sounds of police sirens though!

        2. Hi, Sandra

          Would that sly dog, kannonbiraki, apply to ‘note(s)’ in the wolf verse offerings?
          Betty
          (I cannot abide ear worms…just yuck!) 😉

          1. Oh, jeez, I meant to direct my question to Linda! Sorry for the confusion.

          2. Good eye, Betty. I was so focused on the double kigo that I missed the kannonbiraki–yes, I think so–a wolf’s howl can sound a little like a saxophone, can’t it? Sandra withdrew her bull verse for the same reason–sound. Now let me figure how to put your comment and mine on the appropriate thread where Deborah can easily find it.

            Thanks!

  20. Linda…OK! While I was out driving I realized what’s going on!! As a qualifier for the moon, I was using “wisp” as a noun: one that is thin, frail, or slight; a thin or faint fragment –“a wisp of moon”…trying to indicate the earliest visible crescent moon. So I think that didn’t come through clearly enough.
    I’m afraid this has become something of a humpty-dumpty verse. 🙂

  21. passersby stop
    to applaud a subway
    saxophone player
    – Karen Cesar

    sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    ~Barbara A. Taylor

    may the road
    always rise to meet us
    and the misty moon


    – Lorin

    1. Joel, it feels that there’s a haiku-like cut at the end of line 1. How might you deal with that?

      1. Linda — I sensed that cut too but was hoping it was just me 🙂 Thanks for the affirmation! How about:
        soap bubble as
        moonlit diamonds
        quickly vanish

        1. left the ‘s’ off soap bubbles—
          *
          soap bubbles as
          moonlit diamonds
          quickly vanish

          1. revising just slightly because it better captures the original feel 🙂
            *
            soap bubbles
            as moonlit diamonds
            quickly vanish

  22. sweet reminiscences
    of our bygone days
    ~Barbara A. Taylor

    Congratulations, Barbara. I can hear your Irish voice speaking this one very nicely.

    – Lorin

  23. Hi Linda,
    Is there a place where verse offers for previous verses are accessible?
    I understand that travel to ‘foreign’ or far places is a no-no in the first movement (jo) :

    “Though travel … might seem arbitrary, Carley explains that travel was a grueling enterprise in the Edo period,” – Linda

    But would it be reasonable to count city to suburb commuting as ‘travel’?

    “At a Station in the Metro”
    The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
    petals on a wet, black bough.

    Ezra Pound

    – Lorin

    1. Excellent point. I don’t count city to suburb commuting as “travel”, and I saw both your Coltrane and your faces in the window as commuting. Both were on my short list for the slot but what gave me pause was that the Coltrane verse, being about play on names, pulled me back to the hokku a bit too much–I’d be game to do it in the ha but not this early in the renku. Also, subway to commuter train seemed a close link–if we were in a kasen or hyakuin no problem, Triparshva, however, is a relatively short form and while we’re not under the same pressure not to repeat topics as we would have been in junicho, 22 verses is still not a lot. This concern also affected other verses with train as well as bus, station, etc, and eventually I began to realize that even all the verses with coin, which were also pretty nice, were a little too close.
      .
      I am going to revise all those resource links at the bottom and insert one that will quickly give access to all the prior threads. I’ll also try to figure out how to cross-link when I get an ongoing copy of the renku together for the bottom of each thread.
      .
      Till I get to it [done!–check the reorganized “resources” section], here’s a link to the Renku archives, everything with the tag “triparshva”:

      https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/tag/triparshva/

  24. Creative thinking with season this morning, everyone. We have spring and winter, and moon in a variety of phases–full, crescent, gibbous, and represented indirectly through its moonlight. Including phases and indirect representation is good thinking because there’s the autumn moon coming up in the ha and we should make moon’s two appearances different. Phase or moonlight in this slot would allow the autumn moon to shine full and unencumbered when it comes. Or we could really challenge whomever will write that second verse by depicting a nice full moon in this first appearance. I’m open to all possibilities 😀 .

    Even if you regularly use season in your haiku, the requirements that renku impose are more demanding–the minor moon verse especially so. Now that we’re five verses into the renku, I’m thinking that it’s time to start offering feedback before the closing date for submissions so that you can tweak if you wish. Taking a leaf from Sandra I’ve started to comment here on the thread if the season is off or unclear. No comment means the verse is good to go.

    1. Did you mean “tranquil pond” as spring, Judt? It’s not enough to defang the default of autumn.

      1. Hi Linda…thanks for the feedback, but I’m still in the dark on this…saw in the Higginson list that “tranquil” is an all-spring kigo…?

        1. Ah! Yes! So sorry--my mistake. I had checked the World Kigo Database and didn't find it. Gabi is usually very thorough but she says that the search feature on her blog is no longer working properly. "Tranquility" is there in the Yuki Teikei season word list too.
          While "tranquil" doesn't hit you over the head with season, yes you're right it's spring. The wrinkle here is that you're not only seasoning a verse, you're overcoming an established season reference and changing it to another season.
          There's reinforcement, though--"wispy": just to be sure I looked it up in a few online dictionaries and see that the analogies often given are smoke or clouds. So it's also redolent of "hazy moon", a classic spring kigo.
          Finally, there's context: If we go with a spring moon for this slot, there will be another spring verse following it and the job of that verse then would be reinforce the season unambiguously. The winter moon option wouldn't have this luxury because it would be a singleton season verse in the slot.
          A nicely subtle image, good to go--thanks for coming back to be on this one!

          1. Thanks, Linda…I’m kinda dense here, but not clear on the autumn reference…is it “pond”? I tried to find that but couldn’t.

          2. The autumn reference is the moon itself. Here are a couple of clarifications from the Wikipedia entry on Kigo:
            .
            “moon (tsuki) – all autumn (August–October), and moon-viewing (tsukimi) mid-autumn (September) – the word “moon” by itself is assumed to be a full moon in autumn. Moon-viewing and leaf-viewing in autumn are common group activities in Japan.”
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kigo
            .
            “. . . It may be less obvious why the moon (tsuki) is an autumn kigo, since it is visible year round. In autumn the days become shorter and the nights longer, yet they are still warm enough to stay outside, so one is more likely to notice the moon. Often the night sky will be free of clouds in autumn, with the moon visible. The full moon can help farmers work after the sun goes down to harvest their crops (a harvest moon).”
            (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kigo)
            .
            When it’s needed to move the moon to another season, we have to modify it to knock it out of default mode, as we’re doing.
            .
            As for “pond”, modified by the adjective “tranquil”, the pond is the image that makes your verse a spring moon.

  25. Congratulations, Barbara. A perfect fit. 🙂
    *
    the frozen pond
    glistening in the light
    of a crescent moon

    1. Hi Maureen…cross my heart 🙂 …tried to post my “pond” last night but couldn’t access verse 5 for some reason…it kept going to verse 4…?

      1. That was my mistake, Judt. So sorry. The release was supposed to be this morning; you saw it last night when I hit a wrong key in WordPress as I finished editing. I’m embarrassed and promise hard not to confuse everyone again.

      2. Hi Judt. No worries. So interesting that we chose similar subject matter! The crescent moon is my favorite. “Wisp” is a wonderful word. Take care. 🙂

    1. Deborah, it’s a lovely winter moon verse, though did you realize you have a double kigo–“snow” and “wolf”? That’s not necessarily “wrong”–just checking.

      1. Thank you, Linda. If I kept wolf and lost snow, would the moon remain as a winter kigo because of the wolf or would it revert to autumn? Which would be better to modify?

          1. Obviously “perhaps” is not part of the offering.

            *****

            a snow moon
            climbs within the notes
            of her distant howl

            *****

        1. Yes, Deborah–snow is not necessary. With “wolf” there it’s still a nice winter verse.

          On that Farmer’s Almanac site you’ll see a “wolf moon”, so if you want to keep playing around with different versions, you have lots of time.

          1. passersby stop
            to applaud a subway
            saxophone player

            – Karen Cesar
            *
            sweet reminiscences
            of our bygone days

            — Barbara A. Taylor

            *
            within the notes
            of a distant howl
            a wolf moon rises

            — Deborah Barbour Lundy

    2. Deborah, this exchange between Betty and me landed over on a sub-thread of Sandra’s. If you’re like me, it’s hard finding things in these threads so I’m copying what we said here so you’ll see it:
      .

      from Betty, 7/24/1:53 pm
      “Would that sly dog, kannonbiraki, apply to ‘note(s)’ in the wolf verse offerings?”
      .
      reply by Linda, 7:12 pm
      “Good eye, Betty. I was so focused on the double kigo that I missed the kannonbiraki–yes, I think so–a wolf’s howl can sound a little like a saxophone, can’t it? Sandra withdrew her bull verse for the same reason–sound. . . ”
      .
      Right. The howl won’t work given the subway saxophone in the uchikoshi. Can you think deeper into your wolf/moon imagery and expand it in a different way?

      1. I wondered about that after reading some of the other comments. Thank you for teaching us along the way.

        a wolf moon
        creeps along the spine
        of distant mountains

    1. But “full buck moon” still points pretty strongly to July, as it’s the name of that moon.

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