Tuesday, July 12, 2022: Alegria Imperial's poem "Surrender"

Surrender

On her lens a pair of wild weeds swayed from a rock

by the edge of the lake blooming tips brushing as if in light kisses 

a moving oneness that flashed at me. 

On the scrabble board back home I set the letter “s” for “surrender”. 

“Tell me how,” she had asked. My answer, like waves folding 

 onto each other these: 

The way flowers let the wind play on weakness touching but not breaking 

a kind of touch that instructs bees on gentleness—a kiss that leaves no mark—

that glues the heart, the way the mind pulls threads off words 

let gather from winds bowers of leaves a nest for globules of light. 

Name the globules love the way wind blows out the light the way darkness 

kneads itself to make love real, the way night lets the wind sought 

a kind of song that shreds the light, clouds the heart the way the 

wind tempts the dawn. Grit not tears fractures sight the way the wind lets dust 

ride, whispering words the way some words run into verses to crack the bolts 

that quarantine lovers unleashing them to surrender to flee to bloom, the 

way the weed pair lets the wind swing lash at them, the way they flex together 

how like love could stay possible where it isn’t, musn’t. 

 

(First published in Many Windows, 2011 Magnapoets Anthology Series 4, 

Edited by Aurora Antonovic)

© 2022 Alegria Imperial

A former journalist in the Philippines, Alegria graduated with a degree of Literature in Journalism. Her discovery of haiku decades later, started her writing short Japanese poetry forms. Her works have since been widely published in international journals and anthologies with some gaining awards. Her three e-chapbook collections of contemporary haiku and monoku (one-line) poems can be accessed at The Haiku Foundation’s Digital Library. She immigrated to Canada 14 years ago, where she now lives. 

Tuesday, May 24, 2022: Alegria Imperial's haibun "Robins and Roses at Brooklyn Botanical Gardens"

 

Roses losing petals, lotuses dying on their shadow, a poisonous sumac inflamed, the promised turtle missing, but the persimmon tree pregnant, the spider lily swinging; I pick anise seeds and drink on the scent, pinch tips of dew studded mint, and then stumble on frog stones their absent eyes on summer flies–the water striders have long leaped to infinity–it’s autumn at Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and after tracing the veins of a horse I figure a ficus has turned into from a knight on a horse by a fairy enchanted by his beauty, E and I skip the desert garden breathing heat off a muggy afternoon.

We pass by the Cranford Rose Garden again where I had posed beside a bronze sculpture titled Roses of Yesterday–this wisp of a woman ripened by love and longing sluiced by it in fluid lines. On her left arm, she cradles a clock’s face Time arrested engraved in words Perennis Amour (Love Eternal); on her right as if bidden, she caresses a bunch of roses that drip as if tears from her deep sad eyes. I had posed unabashed beside her, tainting the poetic moment, which I should have sipped in secret.

No perfume quaffs through the air even as we linger to hold on to each bloom thrusting petals on us for a touch. The gray sky stands by unconcerned as we lean toward a curved path to the main gate. Silence and distant chatter drop on my steps and a stirring in the yew branch. A robin has flit from it. The meadow ends and I shake off a leaf from my shoulders to find another leaf that has hitched a ride in a fold of my hood as we boarded the No. 1 train. It must have been the closed-in faces, the inward smiles, the inner rhymes I imagined beat in time with steel grating on steel and soon the scream of brakes that bid us to pour out of the steel doors even as we tighten our grip on moments we can’t soon recall that this haiku wrote itself–not about the roses or the absent turtle but a fleeting glimpse of

robins

skittering on fallen leaves

our grip tightens

© 2022 Alegria Imperial

Bio: A former journalist in the Philippines, Alegria graduated with a degree of Literature in Journalism. Her discovery of haiku decades later, started her writing short Japanese poetry forms. Her works have since been widely published in international journals and anthologies with some gaining awards. Her three e-chapbook collections of contemporary haiku and monoku (one-line) can be accessed at The Haiku Foundation’s Digital Library. She immigrated to Canada 14 years ago, where she now lives.

https://jornales.wordpress.com/category/poetry/haiku-poetry/