Light and dark
The
stars are high up, and I'm lazing about this holiday village. An owl calls and
flies away from a house, while, rising from the reeds, fleshier than in the
city, the moon makes its golden way. On a rock, by the river, a dry face of
many wrinkles turns to me: See this boat? it was my man's. We were together
like thirst and water, but one fuliginous day, he didn't come back. After a
while, my son left home too; the butterfly doesn't stick around its caterpillar
for long...
shell strings
hanging by the window –
marital horizon
Lifeline
On
the wall in front of the house, an old man with his feet dangling towards the
road. Sunlit or shaded (as the clouds will), he seems related to a piece of
stone. He stays up there all day long, sometimes even at night, to be closer to
the road and the angels. At home, there's nobody, even the trees have dried up,
but he has this wall. His parents built it to protect them against the winters
and the people, when they were listening to Radio Free Europe. In a shady
corner, a ripe wild cherry tree.
lifeline –
from one thistle to another
hands and feet
Hidden paths
In
the harsh light of noon, the woman’s hand over the eyes trembles like a broken
wing She lowered the garden fence, so she can see as far as the horizon, where
someone appears now and then, but never reaches her. As the sparrows are dozing off among blue morning
glories, the silence seems too hard to be broken, but a ship’s horn sounds and
some ray of hope is flitting across her blushing face. Time to pull off the
weeds on the pathway home again...
two cups of tea –
coming at the right time
a cloud of rain
Waiting
Dawn.
Shouldering my Nikon, I hunt along a narrow Danube channel. Poking
around in the reeds, I come across a woman sitting by the water, a few rods and
yellow water lilies aligned before her. We are close enough for a dew drop to
reflect us both. She smiles, holding an envelope, but I feel her soul keeled
over and her voice fluttering like a newborn butterfly says: I got this
letter a few years ago but I won't open it.
I postpone my joy until the second one
will arrive.
I wait, you wait –
never enough time
to leave as one
Dust clouds
Holding
a clay pot by the brook, a woman in black shroud asks me: What does it mean
when you dream of an excavator? It was driving along, dragging the forest
behind it, and the wild animals were running in the village, with their young
in the mouth. Then, it cleared the graveyard for bones and dropped them in
ash-pots, but my man’s wasn’t there, so I got this clay pot for him. In the
meantime, I changed my mind.
A
dream is just a dream. And yet, where does this billow of dust come from?
people on the road –
a two eye-spotted shadow
swept up by the wind
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Lavana Kray lives in Romania. Her work has appeared in many print and online publications, as well as in haiga exhibitions organized by the World Haiku Association in Japan and Italy. The WHA awarded her the title of Master Haiga Artist. Many of her photo-haiku have been featured in NHK Haiku Masters on Japanese TV. The Laval Literary Society from Canada awarded her the André-Jacob-Entrevous Prize 2023, for a literary text (haiku) combined with an artistic visual. She currently serves as haiga editor for the online Journal of Japanese short forms, Cattails.