A Poem a Day (394): Blighted trees (4 haiku)

 

 

Thank Crunchie it’s Friday! Another weekend beckons. Let’s hope it’s sunny. 

Here are some little haiku that are about trees. Just trees. Nothing else. No deeper meaning, lol.

 

I was reading an article about writing and inspiration. Where does it come from? Very few of my poems are about myself or my life, so I often find it interestingly funny when people think they are about me. I think writing about myself would be pretty boring, unless I was writing a memoir. And that would be a rocket to the bizarre. 

 

At school, in the big school, our class was encouraged to write about ourselves, our own experiences, but do we? Do we want to? Interestingly, at infant and junior school, we were encouraged to write about anything, the more fantastic the better. 

 

When I was listing my book somewhere (while self-publishing), I was surprised to find poetry listed under non-fiction. I felt like maybe I needed to stick a 'fiction' label on the front of my book.  

 

Is poetry meant to be non-fiction? I don't think there are any rules when it comes to writing. It would be boring to stick to them. I guess some people write poetry about their lives, but I reckon a lot more are writing fiction. I guess with fictional novels, it’s obvious it’s fiction. With poetry, maybe it’s not so obvious. I’m doing a poetry course at the moment, and looking at everyone else’s poems every week, I think they’re also mainly fiction. That’s the adventure in it. 

 

I think many people write as a form of escapism, so you’re outside yourself, you’re writing whatever comes into your head in those minutes or hours about made-up characters, situations you’ve read about elsewhere, situations you imagine, snapshots of life, ideas, emotions made into scenes, people you’ve encountered, life’s mysteries, the common elements of experience. Your own life or your way of looking at things might creep in at the edges at times, but the fun of writing is that you imagine things outside yourself. Otherwise I wouldn’t find it fun. I’d be writing about facts, like a journalist, or keeping a diary.

 

I wrote a song on this subject, called If I Write a Song (it ‘ain’t gonna be about me). I went out for a walk last year in lockdown and started thinking about this subject, came home and wrote it up. My uncle came up with a melody for it and sings it. He turned it into a song, into something bigger than it was. But, anyway, enough of the natter, here we go with some trees…

 

 

Blighted trees

 

Lightning singed, limb-struck,

blackened trunks empty out of

life. Hollowed ground. Sit.

 

 

White plague creeps over

brown knobbled branches emptied

of apples. It yearns.

 

 

Hollowed out, grey self.

Once majestic, skeletal.

A woodpecker stops.

 

 

By night they walk, stalk

their forest lair. Faint spectres.

Giants with no bark.

 

 

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, February 26, 2021