A single, red rose
lies on the snow. Blood on a
clean, white handkerchief.
4 February 2009
This was something I saw during the big snows we had a few weeks ago. I've been very slow to put it up on the blog, as I've had rather a lot going on. As with so many of my "pavement poems", one is left wondering about the "back story": some tragic love affair, or just a florist dropping part of their delivery.
About Me
- Shieh Jen Li
- I'm a time-rich/money poor, single mother. I mostly write haiku, because I like the discipline of the form. I had hardly written anything for years, and it took some terrible events in April 2007, which led to the end of my marriage, to start me writing again. That was the start of a sequence of poems about my divorce, which I have called "Separate Ways". I think each poem can stand on its own, but it is also an unfolding (and as yet, unfinished) story. I have found the haiku form stops me from getting over-emotional and "gushy". It took several months before I wrote about anything else, but when I did ("Summer Solstice"), it felt like a really big step. I think the style and subject matter of my "non-divorce poems" are also influenced by the fact that I am quite a keen photographer, so a lot of them are purely observational, and are about things that caught my eye, because they were quirky or ironic. I believe that my poems are carefully crafted, and I think very hard about every single word (well, you have to, when most of them are only 17 syllables long!). By the way, the photo was taken, while I was actually writing the poems on 8 October 2008!
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