Enormous oak
the daylight moon in its branches
a goat at its foot
Holstein with a heart
in the middle of her forehead
loves the salt lick
Horses in the shade
of a weeping willow
a cascade of piss
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[...] more visible, but this didn’t make the goat look any less otherworldly. Commenters on “Livestock,” the post in which it appeared, likened it to Pan or a [...]
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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"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
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There’s elegant haiku and then there’s piss. I couldn’t help laughing. Love the photos too. Good night~
Actually, I thought the last one was the most elegant. :)
Enjoyed the haiku and photos.
Thanks for stopping by.
Give a horse some privacy!
Hey, they could’ve waited until we were gone! I think they were expressing their contempt of tourists.
:) probably so!
(Great photos! At first, I thought the goat was superimposed on the picture of the tree. The goat looks so fragile and otherworldly against the grand, telluric tree.)
“Telluric” is a bitchin’ word.
I thought so, too. I ran across it a couple of days ago, and this is the first time I’ve used it.
I think I first encountered it some years back in a translation of a Cesar Vallejo poem, along with the word glebe (q.v.).
Wonderful. But that first one looks like a unicorn to me.
Thanks. Excellent point. I think subconsiously I was responding to a certain resemblance to that famous Medieval tapestry of a unicorn.
The goat does seem to be floating. But I would say more Pan than Unicorn.
I had the word “float” in my first draft of the haiku, as a matter of fact.
The post title is wonderfully understated — perfect for the scenes and poetry that follow.
Thanks. I do like minimal titles.
Great photos and haiku. I too thought that goat looked magical as if it were floating. Your mention of a tapestry was the Ah-ha moment!
Oh, good. Thanks. (I missed this comment yesterday; sorry. I wasn’t ignoring you.)
I thought the goat must be a double exposure type collage thingy. I usually wait till the horses have finished their evacuations before photgraphing them, you make me feel awfully prissy and lacking in creative endeavour, it is glorious the way they stand and put their backs into it, isn’t it?
Great stuff here, as ever,
Thanks, Lucy. No, no double exposures. I did select the dark portions of the shot and lighten them so the tree bark would be visible, and this made the goat a more uniform shade of white. The resulting otherworldly impression appealed to me, and I decided to build on it with a couple other effects, although I figured that would make it look like a bit like a collage.
Great pairings, all, but I’m particularly impressed by any verse (and versifier) that can make piss lyrical.
Thanks. I think I’ve been heavily influenced by Issa in that regard.
I really liked the first picture — it stunned me the first time I saw it.
Thanks. It took me four or five shots to get the right one. Fortunately, the goat wasn’t in a real hurry.