Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

This is my first earring haiku (which I think is Wiscon 2001). Shiny green beads named "So I told the duke":

So she told the duke
how the road runs south, and up,
as the clouds streamed by.

Posted here mostly so I'll have it somewhere other than my Palm, and so I can use the tags to find all of them.

Like sisters, the cameraman says, praising our closeness. Is this how humans love their sisters, trunks entwined, a large love more sexual than their little bodies can encompass?

Everyone I know is my sister, mother, aunt, child, or Grandmother. Grandmother loves us all fiercely, never as close as I to my lovers, too wise or too careful for bodily love, for singling out just one or two of her daughters.

We, we are old enough to know this desire, not so old that we must turn from it.

Trumpeting at the purple evening sky, shouting our love to the world, to the herd, always to each other, a long low song of joy.

( Note )

This is from elisem's haiku earring party.

Comfortable vices

Sin was too difficult
for them, so they gossipped
and drank stolen tea.

The earrings in question have shiny brown beads.

The astute reader will note that the syllable pattern on this is 6-6-5; the 5-7-5 version isn't as good. You may insert a hyphen and line break before the c in "difficult" if it pleases you. The astute reader may also note that the word "gossipped" looks funny.

Elise's haiku challenge was a poetry game: she put out pairs of earrings, and if you liked a pair, you could ask their name. From that, we created haiku: either with those words, or something close to them, as part of the poem, or something related to them. Enough structure to be interesting and useful, and nobody had to play.

The pair I'm wearing today are named "Twilight Beacon." Beads of blue glass and carved water-buffalo bone.

I'm still fiddling with the haiku, trying to get it right. Having a quiet half hour in the Green Room--the other two people there were sitting and writing--I also wrote a prose poem on the theme. With two words and a pair of earrings, an overly difficult trip to Wiscon became something else, a piece of the voyage home, and the color of the sky.

Elise and I handed a piece of paper back and forth, editing as we went, with occasional comments like "I know you love that word"; "no, I love the two around it" and "how about a comma here?" while Mike and Lise talked theatre at the same dinner table.

There are a lot of reasons I love Wiscon--this is a new one, or a new cluster of them.

Here's one version, pulled together this morning because I left all the papers at home:

Past alien fields

Home at last. Lightning flashes

a twilight beacon.

[The date and time above are Sunday evening of Wiscon.]