another funeral
paint peeling
from Jesus's robe

at the edge
of town and dusk
solitary cars come and go

steep lawn
boys without shirts
rolling like barrels

sun setting
on the empty farmhouse
cowbell's distant echo

Wabi definition

"the twin brother to sabi . . . can be defined as poverty . . . beauty judged to be the result of living simply . . . austere beauty and poignancy."
Haiku Techniques. Jane Reichold.

abandoned bike
one upturned wheel
spinning slowly

september chill
the rhythm of her snoring
stops . . . starts again

acorn caps
the smallest squirrel
sniffs each one

More on Sabi

"Yoshida Kenko (1283-1350), a court poet who took Buddhist vows in his later years . . . a medieval man who possessed both a fine sensitivity for the poignancy of life and the perishability of all things and a profound nostalgia for the customs and ways of the past. . . . Many of Kenko's preferences--for the asymmetrical instead of the regular, for the subtly suggestive rather than the boldly asserted--can be traced to much earlier times in the development of Japanese culture. But one important criterion of his aesthetic taste, expressed most concisely in the term sabi (aged or antique), was distinctly a product of the medieval era. . . . the medieval Japanese developed a strong liking also for things that showed signs of wear and decay, for the withered, the rusted, the broken, and imperfect."
--Japanese Culture by H. Paul Varley.

watching her
buns
short-order cook

sweeping the cellar
same old thin line
against the dustpan

sabi definition

Sabi : a sad beauty, melancholy evoked by the passage of time, nostalgia, an aloneness but at the same time a recognition that we are all tied together. For further definitions see: http://members.tripod.com/~Startag/Sabi.html ; http://www.niwa.org/Sabi.html ; and http://www.hermitary.com/house/aesthetics.html .

at her bedside
watching the september sun
slide from the room

indian summer
crumbling a leaf
with my big toe

haiku is not a poem . . .

a haiku is not a poem, it is not literature;
it is a hand beckoning, a door half opened,
a mirror wiped clean.
--r.h. blythe

in her garden apron
the flint arrowhead
found when she was young

september breeze
pans hanging in the kitchen
chime softly

fenced-in yard
a ball
leaps free