May Haiku Festival with Green Exodus

Together with Sarah Arthurs, the lead animator of Green Exodus, and in celebration of Earth and poetry, we have been hosting haiku writing sessions at Winston Heights-Mountview Community Centre,

520 – 27 Ave NE, Calgary. See the event poster here: https://greenexodus.ca/haiku-festival/

So far we have spent one windy evening and one rainy one sharing haiku in a circle. We've been noticing how hard it is to shake the tendency to impose meaning, to make metaphors. We've been practicing receiving what is at hand and writing it down plainly as it comes.

Many of us have been writing a haiku every day in May.

Everyone is welcome at our final gathering on Saturday May 31st at Winston Heights-Mountview Community Centre to celebrate our haiku. We will read read haiku in a round and post haiku on compostable paper in trees and bushes in the rain garden on the grounds of the centre. There will be refreshments and an opportunity to add your own haiku to the garden.

Join us at 3:30 p.m. at the above address. Haiku Inspiration: This month I have been reading Kenneth White’s Eyes Wide Open: on the haiku path.

Here’s an excerpt from page 17:

In everybody’s experience, there are days when one’s personal opacity lights up. Like the sky after a storm. One finds one’s-self in an immense silence, in an extremely pleasant emptiness. At moments such as these, says an old Japanese poet, “everything is haiku”.

Also, a great haiku workshop and introduction here:

podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/haiku-and-poetry-2025-a-fresh-start-part-1/id142870459?i=1000701410892

A few attempts by me…

foliate scrolls

a new idea beginning

to turn a page

high above the spruce

a V of silver and white birds

sparkling like fishes

none of the leaves in my yard

is out yet, oh the last moments

with bare open branches