While more tweaking, editting and reshuffling goes on I like to take a wee break midweek to just write a tiny poem. I have dubbed the series as HumpDay Haiku. Although some weeks they might technically be a tanka, senryu, or a micropoem. I have written many haiku, most of which would probably not pass muster with the haiku shoguns, but they give me joy. So I keep trying, hoping that one day I will, like Basho, have that transcendental moment when the frog leaps into the pond.

Incidentally, we are seeing signs of spring though the wind blows and the rain falls from the sky relentlessly. This past weekend I saw a frog hop down our lane. Fortunately, we don’t have a lot of traffic. With so much water around I suspect that we shall be tadpole central shortly. They are welcome to take up residence and keep the slug population under control. I just sowed some early lettuce last week as a good companion to the broad beans. My fondness for broad beans is not so much about their taste as the gorgeous deep purple flowers they sport. It has encouraged me to embrace them as indigenous plant protein that can have its flavour enhanced with a certain culinary imagination.

One can only hope that there is a break in the precipitation so we can set the early potatoes we bought last Sunday, along with some onions and shallots. Would that everyone had a little piece of land where they could grow their own vegetables organically. It would make for much more food security in the world. But we humans have clustered in cities this past century. But even urban spaces can create community gardens and can share wholesome food with those least able to afford them. Gardeners are generous folk and like to share. What corner of this earth could do without more spontaneous gestures of kindness?

In an age when you can get blackberries in the freezer year round, or flown in from Argentina in winter, its little wonder that youngsters (oh, I am sounding so OLD!) have no grasp of what foods are in season locally. We are so reliant on global markets one wonders if COVID-19 will wake us up to the value of providing for ourselves locally and in season. Or, at the very least, appreciate how spoiled for choice we are in winter with imported fruits and vegetables. This time of year was considered the hungry gap by our ancestors. It was why there was such feverish preserving and canning done in August and September, for that time of year when a fruit or vegetable was not to be had otherwise.

But I digress. On for the latest HumpDay Haiku!

Being that I am still deep in re-write mode on the solo poetry collection, I am introducing a little mid-week haiku to relieve my own state of anxiety. Books, it appears, are rather like delivering babies. I have been carrying this project around for more than six months. It is beginning to feel heavy, unwieldy. I am informed that in the eighth or ninth month of pregnancy many women just bark “I want this baby out!” I’m at that stage. I am impatient. My mentor temporises saying “You want your baby to have all its fingers and toes!”

There is also the shadow stuff that rears its ugly head…the ‘am I good enough?’ tape. Then there’s the experience of something akin to imposter syndrome. Call myself a poet?! This is Wobbly Wednesday stuff. Which is all self-indulgence. Then I take myself and the dogs up the lane to the holy well and say a prayer that the work will be good. Publishable good.

In the meantime, here’s something for Hump Day. One for sorrow…there is a lot of that going around in the world. The haiku shoguns will get their knickers in a twist because there is some end rhyme…quite unconsciously done, but there you are! There’s no pleasing some days.