Uninvited Guests

Golden June morning--

in every coffee cup

a tiny brown bug.

Rain Offering

I throw coffee grounds

at the foot of Mount Blanca:

Bring us summer rain. 

This blog feels like a dusty house, closed up for months. Everything looks and smells different, but I'm the one who's changed. I couldn't write haiku for several months. I finally realized that I was grasping too hard at them--struggling to make them work. Then I stopped for awhile to focus on other things. A couple of weeks ago I read a copy of Clark Strand's Seeds from a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey. I read it from the perspective of someone who's lost the ability to write haiku, and then one day, after I'd finally stopped trying, the fragments started coming back. 

Every afternoon the sky fills up with water, but we rarely get any actual moisture. Thunder growls, and a hot, white wind blows dust into the kitchen, but no rain. The coffee grounds are my rain offering. In the morning when I make coffee, I throw the old grounds at the mountain in hopes that she'll make the clouds let go of their burden by the end of the day. With these wildfires, we need it more than ever.