In Your Words

Brenda Roberts

 

Haiku

 

tornado sirens --
flashes of lightning
reveal shredded lives
 
buffeted by storms
death tolls rise --
tender peace treaty
 
 
whispers in my ear
getting more insistant
-- mosquito bites
 
beneath the rainbow
one inch hail
and sunshine
 
 
senryu sequence

 

what are the males for?
one drop of human blood
enables the breeding

science alludes me
does that mean
I was bitten by my child?


senryu
 
Texas midsummer rain --
every twelve inches
a single drop
 

fresh from the shower -
sudden summer storm
wet again!

 

haibun
 
Days After His Escape
 
days after the frogs
death --- tiny swimmers emerge
mosquito larvae

Jethro the frog didn't like his aquarium very much it seems.  Or at least he didn't like the cat's paw stirring it up and so he jumped.  We didn't know where Jethro had gotten to... until we found his body dried behind the couch two rooms away.


leather scrap with frogs legs
a child's scissors abandoned



 haibun

 

Drought
 
water rationing
each car wash
CLOSED

The TV anchor stands in front of the empty car wash lot.  The drought has caused another huge water main to burst and four more cities are forced to ration water.  One town's mayor says, "Our residents must decide if they want water to drink or water for their lawn."


the street becomes
a river      cars float
into sudden crater

The last one touched our township.  A broken line caused a thirty foot sinkhole crater to open spontaneously.  They shut the water off for days trying to repair that one.

 

______________________

Copyright 2006 Brenda Roberts

All Rights Reserved

 

Brenda Roberts is a counsilor-at-large for the Poetry Society of Texas, serves currently as Secretary of the Fort Worth Haiku Society and is immediate past president of FWHS.  She lives with her husband Cliff in Sansom Park Texas.  Her work has appeared in bottlerockets, simply haiku, SpiritSpotDFW, the Go-Shiki-Go column in the Daily Yomuiri newspaper in Japan.  She currently is a reviewer and writer for SpiritSpotDFW emagazine and writes the Bonsai Verse column in DFWPoetry Review. She is author of A Cold North Wind (fantasy), Psychosis (poetry) and co-author of The Poor Man's Cook Book.  Her work is available from SynergEbooks.com