Five Parallel Form Poems by Hansha Teki

 

rosary vigil

quite unnoticed

rattling through

the mysteries

in Breughel's

Icarus

she lived for

it was spring

 

 

 

 

​​piecing

together

haiku path

the edges

of the universe

from

juxtaposition

man

and wife

to conjunction

 

​

clouding

over

a salamander

a moment's

infused

has laid

its eggs

contemplation

in

my mind's eye

 

 

 

 

another year

ends

parallel

lines

the wheels

of a train

derailed

unmet

at infinity

keep spinning

this one-track

mind

star shadows

your now

once dwelt

amongst

is not

together

my now

 

Hansha Teki is a born and bred Middle Earther dwelling on the west coast of Te Ika a Maui, Aotearoa. Poetry was his life-blood through his first 25 years.

When his first-born daughter, with her elven other-worldly beauty and nature, was diagnosed in 1975 with severe autism together with her very emphatic rejection of verbal communication as an ability of any value to her, he himself turned away from his literary endeavours as a tacit alliance with her silence.

Following the death of his own mother in 2009, he resumed his explorations of the imagination and the gift of language in its relationship to identity, mortality, and the world. He was drawn especially to the short poetry forms as positively influenced by the Japanese haikai short forms. These continue to influence his growing body of parallel and other forms of short poetry.

His writings have appeared in short form poetry journals such as Otata, Bones, NOON, Heliosparrow Poetry Journal, as well as a variety of haiku-specific journals and anthologies. He is also co-founder of the Living Haiku Anthology, the companion Living Senryu Anthology, and the haiku journal Under the Bashō.