Three Haiku Strings from Don Mager

Haiku String #38

(Prague in March)

March washed dry leaves

along the bridge curbs--flocks of

little birds gusting

against a big wind.

The wind swoops down like hawks to

follow the river's

brackish elbows.  It

laps the castle walls and the

shuttered shop windows

and children huddle

outside closed school yards.

Wind holds a cold claw.

One must live with false

beginnings that come knocking

and knocking again,

for when the solemn

vocation arrives at one's

doorstep, without them,

one would not know how

to let the door swing open.

One's terror would not

know how to grow vast.

Haiku String #41

(Petersburg in May)

The eastern Baltic

wind rides with the larger sun.

The oaks are bragging

in their new leaves while

pines backdrop themselves like a 

chorus of dancers

who sink into the

blue shadows as the prima

ballerina swirls

incessantly on

one toe.  Birds birds birds applaud

applaud applaud.  And

then, suddenly, you

notice, the fountains have been

turned on in the parks.

Water and light are

whispering their tireless

duet.  You cup it

in your palm--first light,

then water--and spill your lap

with it, palm after

palm, until through the

coarse fabric, chill tongues your thigh,

Baltic tongues your hair.

Haiku String #42

(Paris in May)

Gray rain falls in sheets

like slabs of slate onto black

umbrellas tipped to

brace against the wind.

The sheen on them glistens like

ravens' wings.  Beneath,

heads are bent like tucked

heads of birds.  Ash gray faces,

from which expression

has been wiped away,

as an academician

might wipe the slateboard

of chalk at the end

of a ponderous lecture,

stare down.  They look to

cobbles and puddles

which glisten like old scratched-up

mirrors from which the

silver backing has

become flaked.  The faces in

the puddles stare from

tucked heads and their eyes

are holes.  Day after day in

May, crowds in rain flow

corteges across

bridges.  None seem to have a

destination to

which it intends to

arrive.  Each umbrella's sheen

braces to the wind.

Don Mager's chapbooks and volumes are To Track The Wounded One, Glosses, That Which is Owed to Death, Borderings, Good Turns, The Elegance of the Ungraspable, Birth Daybook, Drive Time, and Russian Riffs.  He is retired and was Mott University Professor of English at Johnson C. Smith University where he also served as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters.  As well as a number of scholarly articles, he has published over 200 poems and translations from German, Czech and Russian.  In the 1970s he published articles and reviews on Gay Liberation.  He lives in Charlotte, NC, with his partner of 36 years.  They have three sons and two granddaughters.