El Salvador Vignettes

By Maggi Sullivan Godman, USA

The gaudy "chicken bus," belching smoke, leaves San Salvador. On the

mountain road to Suchitoto, a woman, her face like a Mayan princess, a

laundry basket balanced on her head. Across the road, a skinny dog

scavenges.

Quetzaltepeque

San Salvador's volcano

below, a burning garbage dump

In Suchitoto, a group of women, once guerillas in El Salvador's Civil

War. One was a radio operator in those grim years. They speak of horrors

they witnessed, deaths, torture. Now they aid domestic violence victims,

provide schools and jobs for the campasenos.

Later, near Lake Suchitlan, I see the mountains where guerilla camps

were hidden, forests decimated by weapons the U.S.military furnished to

the Salvadorean army.

skeleton trees

mute testimony

to bombs

I sit on El Tejado Restaurante's patio. Tables and benches of weighty

pine, varnished golden. Cool terra cotta tiles comfort my tired feet.

Hanging fans silent today, as breezes from the lake ripple tree

branches. In the background, a radio plays "Poinciana," a bossa nova. I

want to swallow this place whole, to capture its essence so I can keep

it always.

the stone fountain is still

mimosa sways

in sunlight

in sunlight

the stone fountain is still

Losing One’s Parents

By Hans Jongman

Not far from my childhood home is a cemetery. This is where my father was buried in April 1950, one month before I was born. While growing up during the 1950s, I had a sense of foreboding about the place and always found it frightening. I therefore stayed well away from it. My mother never took me there either. It was merely within walking distance. Perhaps she wanted to protect me from the sorrow which had become such a huge part of her life and which she did not wish to share with me.

shades of green . . .

on the opposite bank

a lone gull soars into view

One day a schoolmate who was a son of the cemetery's groundkeeper took me there and invited me to his home situated within the cemetery gates. I plucked up the courage to ask him if he could help me find my father's grave. He obliged but unfortunately his effort was unsuccessful. My father's burial plot was not to be found.

clouds . . .

i reckon minutes

before the sun is back

Why on earth did I not ask his father for help? Was it because I felt myself unworthy of addressing to an adult? Maybe so. Children were not expected to speak to adults unless spoken to and I was adhering to this rule to a ridiculous degree. Of course there was such a thing as a ledger to help enquirers to find a particular grave they wanted to visit. I just did not think of it. But even if I had, my father’s remains had, I found later, already been dug up and moved to be added to the bones in the common ossuary. Ten years for a dead body to decompose. It is the custom in overpopulated Holland to move our remains to such a mass grave. The rich can of course pay to keep their graves in perpetuity.

stained-glass window

in the chapel

scent of honeysuckle

Then in 1964 my mother passed away. On the day of her funeral a relative warned me sternly not to have the last look at my mother before she was buried. It was rather unrealistic of him to expect me at my pubescent age to follow such an advice. There was a glass window at the top of her coffin. On closer look it was obvious to me that no embalming had been done to her. My mother's face which had looked so beautiful only three days before now turned colours to undreamed-of-bluish. This changed appearance of my mother shocked me to the core. And I felt that death was sneering at me as if to punish me for disregarding the considerate advice of my relative.

snowfall . . .

the glassblower's lips

on the casket

Much water under the bridge and I have just celebrated my 60th birthday, an age that both of my parents were denied.

glacial wind . . .

on a boulder, the sunlit crest

of a cardinal

Tanabata Haibun

By Betty Warrington-Kearsley, Canada

The 7^th evening of the 7^th Lunar month falls on Monday, August 16^th this year. I recall that when I was a child and living in Singapore then, my grandmother, each year on this night, would set up an altar table in the compound open to the sky. She cut down two long, fat sugarcane stems from the clump growing in the rear compound. In her day, in China, her mother had used bamboo. These were secured to the hind legs of the table and arched in to meet each other in the centre. A red altar apron, colourfully embroidered with celestial scenes and small, appliqué mirrors representing the stars, was tied around the front of the table. Candles and incense were lit as we, adults and children, offered our prayers to the deities and placed offerings on the altar. These represented our desires for good harvests of fish, vegetables, fruit and, coconuts, our family business; red envelopes containing money (hongbaos) for prosperity and good fortune; books, pencils for excellence in our studies; cosmetics and pretty combs to auger beauty and good marriages for the single women in the family. On the altar were favourite dishes for the celestial lovers’ journey to meet each other: dried fruit, nut brittle, and delicious sweet glutinous rice cakes with lotus nut, sesame seed, red and black bean fillings, which we all enjoyed after the ceremony, as well as the sugarcane the next day.

on the altar

she offers her battered doll

for a sister

Betty Warrington-Kearsley, Canada

Wayanad -1 Plantation

By Aju Mukhopadhyay

Secluded from the concrete and wheeled world, surrounded by not-too-lofty hills, Wayanad, a mildly cold valley with greeneries and thick vegetation, rests comfortably in the lap of the mother earth. Former paddy fields have yielded to plantations. This is one of the best spicy parts of Kerala. Here country houses and trees hug each other, creepers and plants tangle together. Living in a room here is a real woody experience, with flowers touching your face, creepers garlanding you.

a huge jackfruit

out of the giant trunk

hangs on the wall

Coffee and coconut with banana and other varieties of plantation crop crowd. Trees create canopies to feel the warmth of the filtering Sun inside the groves. Ginger, turmeric and somewhere nutmegs add falvour and strength to varieties of spices, besides mango, jackfruit and guava trees. Among them are naturally grown flowering trees and creepers to attract bees from distant places. Birds, butterflies and squirrels make life variegated and vibrant.

Western Ghat hills

and Arabic shore from ancient times

invited the foreigners

Wayanad-2 Tribal habitat

Over the years the existence of tribal life world over has been diluted. But some tribes are still thriving in forest lands, living a life nomadic or riverine. Kuruva tribe lives apart, in a corner of Wayanad, settling from neighbouring state after possible loss of their former habitat. They swim in their own stream of life without in any way disturbing others, as the river passes through the forest intercepted by big boulders and stones of various sizes that gather moss.

Transparent river flows

over a broad stony area-

school of fishes

The sheer beauty of the Kuruva Island draws large number of visitors. People of Kuruva tribe, living in the deep forest, sometimes visit the site to meet with the other tribes from the civilized part of the land. Among the teenagers elders too throng. Young couples with children visit the spot to take bath, swim or for a pleasure trip.

She holds strongly

her husband’s shirt-

stone is slippery

Wayanad-3 Waterfall

Surrounded by stones and trees, bushes on the edges, Minmutty water fall creates a pond at the base. Water overflows it and spreads in three four streams divided by big boulders; somewhere deep somewhere shallow but transparent all along, water flows.

The vast area is visited by large number of birds preying on small fishes. Many gather in this part of the Wayanad, after trekking a long distance through troublesome rugged hilly path, to swim or drink awhile. Bottles are thrown here and there. The colours of life splashed make it move.

Mother holds her hand

but the child often slips

to swim in risky water

Conscience and Character

By Ross, Bruce, USA

While watching a DVD on the American poet William Stafford who worked in camps as a conscientious objector during World War II, I learned that he used Mohandas Gandhi’s “Seven Deadly Sins” to stimulate discussions in his classes:

Wealth without work

Pleasure without conscience

Knowledge without character

Commerce without morality

Science without humanity

Worship without sacrifice

Politics without principle

I often used his poem “Travelling through the Dark,” a narrative of his pushing a dead deer still warm with an unborn fawn over a narrow cliff road at night, as a teaching example.

As a child I stood mesmerized as Memorial Day soldiers in uniform marched down Main Street to the blaring and thunder of a live band. I played with Colonial and modern toy soldiers but had no idea what soldiers or war was. But later in life, still with no idea, I had to consider what war was as I was subject to the military draft, to becoming a soldier myself. As did many of my generation. My choice led to a kind of internal conflict that stays with me today.

Decades later, having mollified my conscience with other things, I walked down Fifth Avenue in New York City purposely avoiding the familiar marching band and soldiers in uniform. But I wondered if I could feel what that child once felt.

Veteran’s Day

the foreigner asks

if I like war

Time Travel

By Anita Virgil

Silence of falling snow. . .

YouTube presents Tchiakovsky’s “Swan Lake” performed by Chinese dancers. On pointe, their slender swan queen, with dazzling prowess, pirouettes atop her stoical partner’s head. When the pas de deux ends, the cygnets move across the stage this way and that, en masse with equally mechanical precision.

Decades ago, to New York’s City Center where Balanchine’s ballet corps performs “Swan Lake.” Peering down from the highest balcony I watch prima ballerina Maria Tallchief, the swan queen, regally float among her snowy gently-moving cygnets, her every gesture, swan-like, elegant. For the pas de deux, with partner Andre Eglevsky, no gymnastics. But beyond their technical perfection, a lyrical tenderness bubbles up from their very insides suffusing the perfomance. His lifts bring her slowly rising up, then silently touching down . . .

The lake’s surface water heavy with cold, sinks, and the warmer water at the bottom it displaces rises . . .

In the ancient and evolving art of haiku where delicate images or a gesture or a shift of focus evokes deep emotional response in the reader, periodically there arise schools of esthetics which seek to achieve poems according to mathematical formulas. Then there are the others who set out trusting to the significance of an inchoate feeling that will somehow transform into a poem that reaches the heart. Uncertain how.

deep snow . . .

in the silence

deer tracks