Category: Narratives

montgolfière (haibun)

Photo: Hot Air Balloon Shadow by Snupi2001 @ Deviantart.com
Photo: Hot Air Balloon Shadow by Snupi2001 @ Deviantart.com

Every August there is a festival of hot air balloons in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, called Festival International de Montgolfières. The first hot air balloon was developed by the brothers, Michel Montgolfier and Jacques Eitienne Montgolphier from Annonay, France, in 1782.*

Our family lived near this St- Jean. Hot air balloons depend mostly on calmer winds, 10 miles an hour or less. Therefore just after dawn or late afternoons near dusk generally have less wind speed.  We would sometimes see a shadow cast over the field behind our house during dinner just before sunset.

It is always a thrill to see them up in the air when they take off as a fleet with the varied burst of colours in the sky. Last year I stopped on the highway to look at five balloons floating over Mont St-Grégoire. Such a calming effect when they float over you and you can hear only the puffs of air blowing into the fabric of the balloon.

 In this prompt of Heeding Haiku with HA at MindLoveMisery’sMenagerie, we are given two words, chestnut (autumn) and balloon (spring). What came to mind was the festival a month before autumn. August is considered early autumn.

L’ombre d’une montgolfière

plane au vent doux du mois d’août

mulot fuit le chat

© Tournesol ’14

August wind casts

shadow of a hot air balloon

mouse dodged the cat

© Tournesol ’14

 * History of le mongolfière

bliss (haiku)

Bastet gave us a lovely musical video to help inspire  our muse at MindLoveMiserysMenagerie  Such a lovely choice too! I love violins and the harp…such beautiful instruments that mimic nature as well as human nature.

Bliss

harp breathing life
sunflowers twirl in concert
bees buzz

violin weeps,
mother’s happy tears
newborn

butterfly haven,
sunflowers pirouette
nature’s ballet

© Tournesol ’14

I can’t help but feel movement in this prompt, in nature and spiritually as well. Hence, this will be my offering for Carpe Diem “Movement”

Mother Earth’s quilt (haiga)

Tournesol's avatarTournesol dans un Jardin

Our host has posted music to inspire us. I don’t know about you but fairies, leprechauns and angels keep fluttering in my mind’s eye.  Perhaps it is the Irish in me for I do love Celtic music and this piece brings me close to my Irish roots on Ballybunion. I am not much of a fairy tale writer as you may have noticed in my other blog I wrote for the Lavender Lady at MLMM prompt. My children told me while they were growing up all the bedtime stories, I invented when tucking them in, were not subtle enough…all had a morale to the tale and they quickly figured it out.  . Well, what do you want with a mom who is a counsellor and family life educator?  But I do remember one tale of the rabbit with those long droopy ears and that extra tall giraffe who were…

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rainforest concerto (tanka)

 

The Time Glass  prompt today at Carpe Diem  Valley Stream, is to use the haiku composed by your host AND the photo of a waterfall.  It was tempting to complete this into a tan renga but he did mention a “solo” renga or a tanka.  I could not help but notice the waterfall was a photo in Maui, Hawaii. When I saw the last line of our host, “the silence” I thought of birds singing being masked by the sounds of gurgling streams OR the roar of the waterfalls.

I wanted to include birds from Hawaii and liked the sounds of the honeycreepers such as ‘l’iwi , hearing several examples on Youtube. I wanted to add the name of a tree that these birds inhabit and fell upon the Ohia lehua tree.  Well, that brought me to a legend and Carpe Diem is keen on legends and stories.

Legend explains the birth of the Ohia tree and its flower, the Lehua blossom. The legend is tied to the volcano goddess, Pele. This story explains that if you pluck this flower, it will rain on the same day (for a tragic reason).

The legend of the Ohia tree and the Lehua blossom

The legend says that one day Pele met a handsome warrior named Ohia and she asked him to marry her. Ohia, had already pledged his love to Lehua. Pele was furious  so she turned Ohia into a twisted tree. The gods took pity on Lehua and decided it was an injustice to have Ohia and Lehua separated. So, they turned Lehua into a flower on the Ohia tree so that the two lovers would be forever joined together. So remember, Hawaiian folklore says that if you pluck this flower you are separating the lovers, and that day it will rain.

What a beautiful legend…so romantic too!  Now to complete this prompt:

Our host wrote:

Gurgling valley stream
brings joy to the heart of Mother Nature –
Il Silenzio © Chèvrefeuille

l’iwi – wikimedia

 

Waterfalls
drown echoes of wildlife
ohia tree
‘l’iwi chirps a concert
sucking on a lehua

© Tournensol ’14

 

I’iwi honeycreeper sees off an Apapane

Pearly grey isn’t so bad (haibun)

Things rarely turn out as I imagine. This is sometimes best for what joy, discoveries and excitement would I find if my life was all mapped out. I’d be like a peg on a wall map. My need to control would actually make me a slave of my making. Do I get disappointed with the outcomes of life’s events? Of course I do many times. The heartaches, the disappointments and the self-degradation are part of life and in some ways who I am. I am a product of my past and life experiences. How I make of it, is still my choice. We always have choices…not always in abundance. I may have to choose for a pearly grey from a drab grey but still, I have a choice. And with the darkness of despair how else would I be blinded by the beauty of the glowing stars as well as golden sun? If I have doubts about love and being loved, I meet exuberance when I am embraced by those who do love me. It may come from someone I have not been waiting and then that makes it a double bonus cherished and forever imprinted on my heart.

I am a daydreamer by day and by night. Many times I cannot tell where a dream started or where a fantasy ended. And is that important? When life takes too long to show its glowing stars, I escape into stories I devour for days and days. And more recently, I dip into my consciousness and write what transpires from many escapades in delusions and fantasies, me, myself my muse and I.

© Clr ’14

 skies weep,
autumn showers
paths shimmer

© Clr ’14

raindrops
on golden leaves
hold me hostage

autumn wins

tints compete
greys lose race,
autumn scoffs

© Clr ’14
© Clr ’14

mediocre mouse
corn field plays
bumblebee
dreaming on canvas
beauty penned at night

 © Tournesol ’14

 MindLoveMisery’sMenagerie  Heeding Haiku with HA

Café de nuit (shadorma)

Terrasse du Café le soir  par Van Gogh- Wikipédia

rendezvous
terrasse du café
sous la nuit
des étoiles
ce soir, sont engagés
pour s’aimer toujours

~

rendevous
at café terrasse
underneath
the night stars
that night, they made their promise
forever to love.

© Tournesol ’14

Mind Love Misery’s Menagerie – Bastet’s Shadorma Photo Prompt

False hope (shadorma/senryû)

Originally posted at Tournesol dans un Jardin at BlogSpot.

When I saw this photo taken by Georgia at Basket and Sekhmet’s Library, I had to smile.  I had taken a phto of 2 pay phones in the Métro last Spring.  The fact that these are near such a lovely green space stirred contradictions…beauty, ugliness, pleasure and pain and this is what my muse came up with for  Bastet’s Shadorma Prompt at MindLoveMiserysMenagerie.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

(shadorma)

Assaults lurk
In the dead of night
behind trees
far from phones
cyclists never heard her screams
would have dialed for help.

(senryû)

predators always
study their territory
and their prey.

(shadorma)

phones by parks
gives false illusions
of safety
late at night
listen up! one`s never safe
when monsters still breathe

© Tournesol ’14

Now to make this fun a little and give me more of a challenge, I am adding my photos of these phones in the Métro. Having looked at them, my muse seems fixated on sad affairs.

 

© Clr '14 Montreal Métro Pay Phone
© Clr ’14 Montreal Métro Pay Phone

 (shadorma)

unused phones
 ever see someone
actually
Use a phone?
subways are sometimes seedy
all’s in the open

(senryû)

people make believe
blind to sordid actions
“I ain’t seen nothin’”

(shadorma)

Unless there`s
a Samaritan
does good deeds
calls for help
shouts out loud scaring monsters
back into their hole.

(tilus)

Wherever you go, bring
along a
friend.

© Tournesol ’14

Originally posted at Tournesol dans un Jardin, by Cheryl-Lynn Roberts

Time lingers (senryû)

gal-2640553

Photo credits: Julie-de-Waroquier@DeviantArt

Better late then never, I say with this interesting photo prompt. Photo challenge #20 Time Goes by like a train, at Mind Love Misery’s Menagerie awakened my memories of living by the train tracks near my grandmother’s home.  I used to run across as the gate was just coming down, bells ringing and the man in the tower shouting at me to stop but a few times, I still took a chance.  How lucky I was not to end up like this though I just wrote…

railway crossing
yesteryear’s tragic loss
her ghost still walks

© Tournesol

But this prompt’s title also inspires thoughts about time and we have had several haiku prompts from a few different blogs on “time” in the past weeks.  This is what the photo with the title inspired…

summer days crawl
forlorn, waits for her lover
but time has stopped

© Tournesol

Thank you, Yves, for this interesting photo challenge! I am slowly transferring all my short form poetry under the nom de plume, Tournesol @ Tournesol dans un jardin.

©  Clr 14/08/11

Death (haiku)

knock knock
emptiness so hard to fill
death.

(c) Tournesol

for Heeding Haiku with Ha, at mindlovemiserysmenagerie

life is (haiku)

life’s a miracle
death is inevitable
time will tell

(c) Tournesol

Submitted for Heeding Haiku with Ha, at Mindlovemiserys Menagerie