SHISHI-ODOSHI IN THE CONSTITUTION GARDEN

by Richard L. Matta 

A bamboo pipe

sun-bleached to parchment paper white

trickles water like truth

makes deliveries to a receiver pipe,  

and when it’s had enough, it doesn’t lie still 

but sounds an alert. 

Big red dragonflies 

alight on the pipe, as if to refute the value

of the water, and all the while 

little blue dashers 

zigzag for attention. The lower rocker pipe 

fills and pivots and spills 

and smacks a rock and

who should stay in place 

but the big red dragonflies. 

The device is like a gavel for everyone to hear

but despite the crack 

it’s become background static.

Not even a deer or boar

would hesitate to spy and steal 

and disrupt the plentiful garden 

where a shishi-odoshi 

is just an artful design. 

Richard L. Matta grew up in New York and now lives in San Diego. Some of his work is found in Ancient Paths, Dewdrop, San Pedro River Review, Third Wednesday, Gyroscope, and many international haiku journals. 

AT THE FOOT OF THE MOUNTAIN

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Trees scorched by the L.N.U. Lightning Complex fire, the second largest in state history, in Napa County, Calif., on Monday. Credit: Ian C. Bates for The New York Times, August 24, 2020

The forecasters tell us
More electrical storms
Are on the way
Like the ones last week
That started the fires
Burning the countryside
All around us,
Filling our air with toxic smoke,
And forcing us
To remain indoors
Where I sit right now
At the front window
Watching the trees across the way
Sway and bend
Ever more energetically,
Like atheletes warming up
For the Big Game.

On a normal summer day
Our street is a pedestrian throughfare,
Walkers pass by
From morning to night
In ones and twos,
Skateboarders, bikers,
Families with dogs,
But today, no one is out
No one to wave and smile
Back at me
Standing in the front window,
No passersby to shrug
And grin forlornly
About the fix we’re in.

We are packed
And ready to evacuate
Should the predicted storms
Ignite a fire on the mountain
That could rampage
Down the forested slopes
And threaten our community
With incineration.
We wait.

This is big. This is Weather.
This is Climate.
This is the whole interconnected
Systemic enchilada
Recalibrating on a planetary  scale,
Because, well, we know why...

The little girl who lives across the street
Is standing in her large front window
And when she spots me
She waves excitedly
As she always does,
And as I always do
I respond with equal delight.
A father and son
On roller skates and scooter
Zip past in the street,
The first I’ve seen today,
A fire truck drives by
In no particular hurry
As if to reassure the neighborhood
That attention is being paid,
The wind has died down,
The trees have ceased their calisthenics
For the moment at least,
But I remain at my post
On high alert.


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His most recent books are To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World and Cancer Cantata. With his wife Cynthia, he produced the award-winning documentary film Outside In and, with the MIRC film collective, made the film Por Que Venimos. His interviews with soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were made into the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California. He podcasts at: thirdactpoems.podbean.com .

HALF STAFF

by Laura Rodley

Flags should be at half staff
for the innocents who went before us,
the front line sounding the alarm,
take heed, watch out, we’re the first.
Without them, there would be no frantic
rushing to close the gates of the broken dam
waging Covid-19. Without them,
no one would take Covid-19 seriously.
For the other elders at Life Care Center
at Kirkland, Washington,
and for the elders in other nursing homes
who receive no more visitors,
for the taxi drivers, actors in community
theater, restaurant workers, singers,
for those on their own front line,
for the medical workers, among the first
to be ill, the first to be tested, for the first wave,
the loss of the world
as we know it, gone,
flags should be at half mast,
for the knock to internal feelings of security
for the loss for many of financial security
for the loss of a sense of direct community
found by walking amongst each other,
flags should be at half staff.
Yes, communities have regained strength
through illustrious singing and the internet,
but for the innocents who went before
alerting the souls aboard this ship of planet earth
before their leaders did,
the flags should be at half staff.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee, and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing and Counter Point by Prolific Press.