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Posts tagged ‘Haiku’

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood /And sorry I could not travel both /And be one traveler, long I stood /And looked down one as far as I could /To where it bent in the undergrowth. /… ―Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, 1916

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In a yellow wood, a pencil pusher, horning in to push pencils, comes to a fork in the road, where a Pulitzer poet is standing on the horns of a dilemma.

“And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back. /…

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“Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.” ―Mason Cooley


Ghosts fear it. Crooks smell it. Clowns wear it. Mimes yell it. Painters smear it.

“I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”

Joan Miro


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“The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” ―Ludwig Wittgenstein


A body of art is illuminated from the inside, or the outside is just another pretty hide.

“It takes more than just a good looking body. You’ve got to have the heart and soul to go with it.”

Epictetus

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“The pen is the tongue of the mind.” ―Horace


 

The Zen poet’s mindstill as an inkwell in an oil field; humble as a page of faint praise; silent as one hand clapping in a forest falling on deaf earsis as sharp as Sam Samurai’s sword: like a steel stylus, shredding erudition into pulp fiction.

“Writing is a very focused form of meditation. Just as good as sitting in a lotus position.”

Alan Moore

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“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.” ―Isaac Newton


Suppose all the bird baths, ornamental ponds, swimming holes, creeks, swamps, lakes, oceansall the water on the planet including what’s left of the glaciers, even the condensing vapor in the clouds―suppose it was all slurped up into a gob and spit into space: would that leave the planet dry?

“Among the planets orbiting the Sun, Earth is clearly the ‘water planet.'”

Water Encyclopedia

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“Being able to breathe underwater would be sweet.” ―Cameron Bright


Even without the Japanese sound effects, a 17th-century haiku named for an amphibian, makes a big splash.

Old pond! / a frog jumps in / water’s sound

Frog haiku by Matsuo Bashō; English translation by Robert Aitken

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“Sometimes I find I’m wearing a divided, split brain in terms of drama and humor.” ―Ridley Scott


A good laugh splits your sides and face. So your guts and brains fall out.

“Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.”

Edward de Bono

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Science Detectives Find Eden Where Adam and Eve Left It


 Ages before scientists traced the biblical Garden to the dark continent, Michelangelo painted “The Creation of Adam,” as if the first anatomically modern person were as pale as Pope Julius II, who paid for the job.

“The old master painter from the faraway hills
Painted the violets and the daffodills”

Haven Gillespie

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A poem with puns in praise of a lucky lamb in a pastoral picture, and words a good shepherd lives by


 A Lamb in Chic Clothing

Branded on a range not on a grill / Cooler in a pen than a pan

“It is the duty of a good shepherd to shear his sheep, not to skin them.” Tiberius

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“Stand a little less between me and the sun.” ―Diogenes


From the ceiling beneath our feet, the skies seem frayed as faith at the end of days.

“If you’re looking down at Earth, you’re looking through an atmosphere that has a bit of haze in many places and not just occasional clouds.”

Buzz Aldrin

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