Hi you haiku

I have haikus to post today and tomorrow, and that will be the end of this project . . . unless. . .  my international readers step up! Sending out a challenge to Poem Elf readers in countries outside of the United States to send in a quarantine haiku. I know you’re there, I see you.

 

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Tom McGrath, a new grandfather from Chicago, sends in a vision of dreamy peace:

 

Haiku for Emilio Tomas

 

A newborn slumbers

limp against this grandpa’s chest,

a lion at rest.

 

Tom adds that the original final line was “big sister pokes him.” Two completely different poems! I like both.

 

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From her quarantine in downtown Baltimore, Trish Rawlings muses on what she found on the ground outside the grocery store:

 

White latex gloves dropped

Rudely on the lot up close

Are not: pale blossoms.

 

(What she thought were a shopper’s protective gear was actually blossoms from a shedding tree. Would that all nasty sights turn out to be blossoms!)

 

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My brother-in-law Richard has temporarily re-located from Massachusetts to California to help care for his little grandsons as his daughter-in-law recovers from health issues. (Yes, he is that great a human!) Being so far from his wife, he thought about other separations, including mine from my daughters (we are literally thousands of miles apart and will be for the foreseeable future), and he came up with this, which ends with classic New England stoicism and a signature Bostonian phrase:

 

Haiku from San Diego

Daughters coming home
Squeeze is what we want to do
Fa’ get about it

 

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Benedikt Rochow, an engineer from Alabama, took a break from working at home to come up with this—

 

A man a plan a
canal Panama really
is a palindrome.
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Last one. I’ve been reading a lot of essays about how this virus is helping us get back to our core selves, our shared humanity, the things that truly matter. Marge from Chicago says the same in her haiku:
Corona’d we are
Self-starters we have become
Reliant on God
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Thanks, everyone! More tomorrow.
**APOLOGIES FOR THE BAD SPACING FOR THE LAST TWO HAIKUS. I HAVE TRIED TO FIX IT AND AM UNABLE TO!

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