Savoring “dim sum” with friends on a lazy Sunday has always been
a special treat for me. The four poets in the Route 9 Haiku Group —
Yu Chang, John Stevenson, Tom Clausen, and Hilary Tann, have a
monthly dim sum feast, while sharing and editing their haiku. The
result is their biannual journal, Upstate Dim Sum. Thanks to Tom
Clausen, I have the most recent edition right here on my desk. It
is a handsome volume, with 36 pages of haiku and senryu.
Please enjoy a course or two with me and our Honored Guests,
from Upstate Dim Sum (2005/I):
just long enough
to leave an impression
dragonfly
planting bulbs
the ring I gave you
in sunlight
Yu Chang
dying light
at the corner of the shed
chickens peck away
big test day
she scrambles an extra egg
for his breakfast
butterfly,
I hate
my job
potluck
Count Me Out: Talk Left is encouraging its visitors
to sign a petition proclaiming “Howard Dean Speaks for Me.”
(Read more about the unrepentantly controversial Dean, here,
in today’sWashington Post., “Dean Urges Return to Moral
Values”)
Here’s my petition (yet again) to Howard Dean:
“You were chosen because of your fresh ideas
and your affinity with youthful voters. We ‘adults’
in the Democratic Party would like you to start
stressing Ideas, rather than merely being fresh.
Arguing like a 20-something is not going to return
our party to a winner in presidential races. Yes,
stress values, but don’t bury them under the mud
of silly name-calling.”
See our towards a “democratic morality” and majority (Nov. 3, 2004)