November PAD Chapbook Challenge 2019: Day 8: Hens

Image by Capri23auto from Pixabay

When I was a child in New Mexico, my family kept chickens. We had hens of many different varieties, and we would take the extra eggs and sell them at the farmers' market. Sadly, when my father got a job in Colorado after obtaining his doctorate, we couldn't take the chickens. We gave them to some family friends. I have always wanted to keep hens again, and maybe once my son and I are done working on clearing the mobile home out for sale, it will become a possibility.

I remember them

and the gifts they gave to us

lovely feathered friends

~Cie~

Notes:

The November PAD Chapbook Challenge prompt for today was to write a poem about an animal. So, I wrote a Haibun about some hens.

My little home for poetry used to be subject to an unpleasant visitor who would quibble about minutia, claiming that every poem I wrote was suspect because I mentioned occasionally using the Haibun form to write flash fiction. This individual stated that a Haibun must always be non-fiction. However, the description of a Haibun from Poetry Soup is as follows:

"A Haibun is a type of poem that operates on a prosimetric structure. It combines the forms of prose and haiku to create an artistically-challenging puzzle. However, these poems can cover a broad range of topics and expressions, including anything from short stories to personal journals and scholarly essays.

Haibun poems originate in Japan and were invented in the 17th century by famous poet Matsuo Basho. He thought to combine popular Chinese prose elements with Japanese haiku styles for an educational and creative outcome."

Thankfully, this person got miffed at me for not interacting with them beyond the basic acknowledgment of their presence, told me off, and, mercifully, fucked off. I was a bit astounded by their vehemence but mostly happy to have them gone.

Poetry should be about expression. If you're more concerned with adhering to extremely strict rules than with expressing your thoughts and emotions, you're doing it wrong. But, you know, do it how you like in your house. Just don't come to my house and tell me I have to do things the way you do.

Carpe Diem #1774 Renga With Jane Reichhold ... apples for lunch

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dad on high

dropping from his trees

apples for lunch

I walk to the chicken coop

to visit my friends the hens

southern sunset

filling the apple bin

a deeper red

thinking of a time gone by

when the sky was beautiful

applesauce

the cinnamon glow

of a kerosene lamp

we didn't need to have one

my mother liked how it looked

windfall apples

palaces for worms

American pie

I started getting to know

worms eating into my brain

straight falling rain

tiny lakes upon the tree

stem hollows of apples

I have always loved the rain

but it's the snowy season

baskets in a row

overflowing with apples

on one a sweater

was it my mother's or mine?

Dad goes on picking apples

~Jane & Cie~

Notes:

The Hokku stanzas of these Tan Renga were created by Jane Reichhold (1937 - 2016). The Ageku were created by me.

When I was writing my Ageku, I was remembering my childhood in New Mexico between the ages of four and ten.

It wasn't idyllic by any means. We were very poor. But we did have a half-acre of land, and we had chickens and fruit trees and we grew corn and beans.

We also ate a lot of stuff like boiled soybeans and buckwheat groats. I still like buckwheat groats. You could put a bit of butter and honey on them and they tasted good. However, to this day, I loathe boiled soybeans. I would eat my shoe before I would ever eat another boiled soybean.

I knew I was weird and different from a very young age. These days doctors would probably put me on Ritalin and antidepressants. One did try to put me on phenobarbitol when I was a year and a half old because I didn't sleep for crap. My mother said it had the opposite effect and I was awake for three days straight. 

It probably put me into a manic state. It may even have been what triggered the onset of my bipolar disorder. Any doctor who would instruct a parent to give phenobarbitol to a child needs a damn good whacking, and nothing will change my mind about that.

Carpe Diem Field of Flowers: Honeysuckle

I can remember

the smell of honeysuckle

New Mexico night

~Cie~

Notes:

I recently completed and am about to submit my manuscript for the Insecure Writers' Support Group anthology contest. The genre is middle-grade historical fantasy/action.

I normally write for adults. I find writing for youth extremely challenging. I ended up opting to write a lightly fictionalized autobiography of myself between childhood and my pre-teen years which centered around my imagination and the fantastical fiction genres which inspired me. In writing about myself I ended up opening a lot of pockets of unresolved grief.

The place I lived between the ages of four and nine was a semi-rural pocket in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where people could have small farms and keep chickens and such. We had a very large yard, a half-acre. Unfortunately, the house was in rather a shoddy condition and cockroaches the size of school buses had a tendency to get inside. The bugs are huge in New Mexico, and I was not keen on that. But I did love the little skinks and horned toads and such. We also had many beautiful plants around such as the honeysuckle vines, and the cicadas would sing us to sleep.

I was a very shy child and did not have many friends. The characters I met in fantasy worlds were my friends, as were my pets and the animals in our yard.

Although I was born in the Western United States and raised in the Southwest for a number of years, my parents were both from New York. When certain relatives would visit, they would ridicule my accent. A New Mexico accent is a bit of an off-Texas drawl. To this day, I bristle whenever anyone askes the seemingly innocent question: "where are you from?" To me, that question is loaded.