I went in the booth
to be alone with you lot,
my fellow citizens.
Feel free to leave your own Election Day haiku (or American sentence) in the comments.
I went in the booth
to be alone with you lot,
my fellow citizens.
Feel free to leave your own Election Day haiku (or American sentence) in the comments.
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This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.

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Contact me for a signed copy
Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit
Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded
Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters
Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond
The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning
Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop"
Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems
Spoil, an online collection of my older poems
(For a complete listing, see my Google profile)
not native fruit
i find them inspiring because they represent ordinary working-class people expressing their spiritual creativity in a free and exuberant manner. these folks allow their spirit and zest for living to spill out creatively filling space and air with color and sound. against the backdrop of an often grim and always gritty-gray environment they project an alternative.
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Somewhere in NJ
Owls are the stuff of imagination. Seeing these keepers of shadow requires exploring the edges of light... if one fails at it, the fault lies not in the seeing, but instead with one's way of looking.
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Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
Sometimes the cold was such that I sat with my feet in newspaper-stuffed cardboard boxes to stop my toes from freezing. So there was rigour and hardship of a kind, which is what I wanted. I think perhaps over-idealising solitude might be a failing of creative people.
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Velveteen Rabbi
The sadness arises
again
and cuts my legs
out from under me
the monotony
of trying to soothe
screams as frequent
as the waves...
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Small Change
Camille Claudel hugs the marble child
she made, while Rodin lectures her
on the tyranny of feelings.
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slow reads
I wave at black windows as the orange bus sets. My son, where do you sit? Do you see? look?
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Crackskull Bob
One good thing about drawing snow scenes is you can leave a lot of space blank. Artists are basically lazy, or else you'd find us working down to the Ford plant or whatnot. Instead of losing appendages in machinery or listening to assholes say "How's that report coming, Taylor?" we get to sit around playing with paints, a skill we pretty much mastered in kindergarten.
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Journey to the Center
Some names were as familiar as my own — Argiope aurantia, Anatis mali, Erythemis simplicicollis…. well, there were dozens and dozens of them. In the weeks after we began our fight with cancer, those names would gradually be replaced by the names of chemo agents, bones requiring radiation treatments, drugs available under clinical trials, and so on. Gradually, over time, it was as though some strange cloud of selective amnesia descended upon me.
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Creature of the Shade
One of the most basic pleasures of the Australian landscape, to me, is the complex sensation of being watched by a kangaroo.
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Coyote Crossing
Longing and terror are both of them valid responses to the immensity of this landscape. It seems a shame to me that there are people who have never seen a thing like this, who have never once been out of sight of civilization’s scars upon the earth. Those are the only places I feel whole. What kind of truncated life it must be, to have all your skies dissected by overhead wires, all your earth parceled out in neat lots.
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All content by Dave Bonta at Via Negativa is available for reprint and remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Grey foggy morning.
I cast my historic vote!
Now the bright sun shines.
I will love your bright and laughing eyes even if you vote for McCain.
(I did an American sentence instead. Seemed appropriate.)
Governing a large country is like cooking a small fish..
My absentee vote
cast days ago, before the rain
And now, the sunshine
Your election day,
mine too in this shrinking world:
our hopes together.
My foreign vote floats off
in a bottle but today
I’m what feels adrift
(dale – Yes. I’ve edited the post to make it clear that American sentences are also welcome.)
Choose another one
Make him better than the last
We’re holding our breath
If Barack don’t win
We’ll welcome him in Kanuk
To be our PM!
(Translation: Let me tell you, if you don’t vote Barack Obama for President we’ll be happy to have him as our Prime Minister up here in Canada.)
A growing reek:
some farmer has expressed his views
with a manure spreader.
London boy, thirteen,
Sets his clock for five am.
“It’s history”, says he.
Bits from voters swirl –
wagers on democracy.
Hope trumps past rebukes.
Grey skies lower
On a day full of Hope,
Barack Hussein Obama
On tenterhooks,
Hope and fear for O,
Even here in Canada
(as Brenda said, we’ll take him if you don’t)
I stumbled awake
5.30, turned on, broke fast
on euphoria.
Yes, I’m thrilled to death, but I am always plagued by irony. Here are a couple of attempts at Haiku.
We call upon
Descendent of our oppressed
To save us from ourselves
Finally a chance
For fair share of the pie
It is already eaten
this morning the light
seeped through grey clouds, felt its way
over the landscape
Thanks, all. Some real gems here!