Haiku Duck

This is what I woke to at the city house last week.  They were all splashing and diving in my little goldfish pond.  I loved the moment.  In the next, the weenies barked and the mother flew over the edge and onto the lower lawn, quacking loudly to her brood to follow her. It is an eight foot drop and I thought, oh no, there wasn't any way, but all nine babies hopped onto the rocks and leapt over the edge in free fall.

If you remember, her eggs were snatched by something in the spirea bush.  Another mother lost her entire brood in one day.  Like the travails of Jemima Puddle-Duck, nature and farm life can be cruel sometimes, a fact Beatrix Potter herself observed.  This mallard mother is a good one and seems to be caring for them.  She brings them back many times a day.  So, I've named her Haiku.  Why? I don't know.

I don't really understand haiku poetry, but do appreciate the ability to be succinct; say what needs to be said in as few words as possible.  

Here are a couple of haikus for you.

In the sharing 

of simple pleasures

we become closer still.

Sitting by the lake

watching the ducks swim about

comfort in nature.

Well, I Never

I am at the city house this week and perusing the aisles at my local Barnes and Noble bookstore, a stop I always make when coming to the city.  I spied this periodical because of the title and thumbed through it.  Wow.  A cookbook that starts out with the launch in 1977 of the time capsule aboard the Voyager spaceship into deep interstellar space in hopes that one day another civilization might find it and know of earth and its inhabitants.  Natural history, geology, space, oceans, pot-feuled trips to the tune of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon to Stravinsky, origins of species, whew!  Sounds like the kind of cookbook I would write - unable to stick to topic and going from one thing to another.

How about a recipe for a Coconut Lychee Aquarium?  Gelatin, coconut milk with lychee juice and other ingredients; you use a syringe to add the things into the bowl shaped jello dish.  Gorgeous and tasty I am sure.

Beautiful; it just blows my mind.

How about an Encyclopedia of Nuts Bar with Chia Pudding for dessert.  Notice the snakeskin in the bottom righthand corner of the page.  I have them and vertebra from water moccasins.  So me.

Perhaps you'd like to try this bread which sounds and looks delicious.  It even has its own haiku.

Beauty, old as time.

Fossil's senior citizen,

Round and round it goes.

(Kind of like the recent post about Joni Mitchell's song The Circle Game.)

I put this in there because it is so me.  I have many nests like this.  They also have cocktail recipes like Quicksand Cocktail.

I added this picture because it is one of many gorgeous photos in the book; this one of crystals which I like to collect.  One of the recipes is Crystal Shrimp Dumplings which really are clear. From Lunar Pear Clafoutis (which does look like a pock-marked moon) to a Butterflied Chicken Diorama recipe, I kid you not, this book should have been aboard the Voyager.  So full of essays and the aforementioned topics and recipes.  On the last page of the book is a beautiful essay that begins:

Book Forgive Everything

First there's stellar wind.  A single star, like the pale hair of a girl.  The dim universe plucked with light...

This gorgeous, original book is out there.

Face The Wind

Seasons of change

Nature waits

The animals face the wind

Donna B. Shaw


The genesis of this painting was the approach of winter and the hardships that come with it.  Then, I wrote the haiku and it morphed into the future animals face, with human over-population, the loss of habitat and environment, extinctions, critical mass, etc., etc.

Crows, Crowing, Crowed

I have a thing about crows.

Why, I do not know.

Crow, crowing, crowed.

A little nonsensical haiku for you. It is late, AND, a big ice storm cometh. I need to sleep and rest up for the days ahead as an impending ice storm makes me ill. We have had two major (they said 200 year) ice storms. One in 2001 and again in 2007. Anyone with the misfortune of living through these terrible acts of nature will know why I ramble on about this. I would rather have tornadoes around my house than ice storms. Now, the indians (I think the Cherokee), think of crows as a bad omen. I just like them. I have them all over the house in various forms; collect them for some reason and also paint them or sculpt them. Maybe I used to be a crow. The first pic is of a large oil painting I painted, The Crow's Picnic. Click on the pic to see them closer up. The second pic is a crow decoy; who would think of hunting crows? I have many decoys and was shocked that someone would hunt a crow. The third pic is a baby crow sitting on a yearling horse's mane, holding on for dear life. The horse is bucking to try and get it off its back. It is one of my life-sized paper sculptures I told you about. I'll show pics of the pony later. The fourth pic is a wool wall hanging by an artist named Earlene from Coweta, OK. Crows are very smart, except for one. Years ago, I saw a crow bothering an owl in a tree out in front of my house. Would not leave that owl alone. Next morning, the crow was on the ground, deader than a doornail. Another bad thing happened to a few more crows. The old meany that lives down the road (the original old crow) shoots them and hangs them around in her trees upside down. Guess it is supposed to scare more crows away. Oh, I guess enough said about crows. Love you guys. And I'm so happy to have you virtually in my life.