FACEBOOK POETRY PROJECT: NEW PROMPTS

In keeping with my ongoing experiment in forming a community through poetry, here is the second set of hokku to which you are invited to respond. For those who may be new to the project, the hokku is the original haiku but is intended as a prompt for a two line, 7/7 response. Together, the hokku and the response make a tanka, and that is what I am hoping to collect here: a record of brief poetic conversations with whoever may be interested in taking part. So to repeat the original plan, here's the proposition:

I will post a series of hokku (many of which will be haiku I have previously posted but some of which will be new) to my homepage and share the link to Facebook. Anyone who feels inclined can then visit the initial offering, choose as many hokku as appeal to them, compose concluding couplets, and post the completed five-line poems as comments back on the homepage (not on Facebook, please). After a couple of months, I will go through the whole shebang, make a generous selection of completed tanka, and assemble a collection of our group efforts for free distribution as an eBook, of course giving proper attribution for all collaborators along with links to their own online artistic endeavours. The ideal release date would be the Spring Solstice, but that would depend on how things were moving along.

Please respond to as many of these as strike your fancy. The more you do, the better the project will work. Here are today's offerings. Incidentally, all of these were written this morning, between 5:30 and 6:30, in response to pieces from Raven Mack's Beerbox Haiku: A Thousand Feathers Collection. Just to go all meta on your asses. Also, I recommend the book quite highly.

The road, paused, projects

rows of orange flagging tape,

summons a work crew.

In the autumn woods,

a stone wall tries to conjure

lines on someone's map.

My wife says "laugh lines,"

but the mirror says "crow's feet"--

open eyes take flight.

Skid marks to the ditch:

some self-important mother

put up a white cross.