Five Food Haiku

All these poems were previously published but appeared together as a sequence on a postcard as part of the City of Redmond’s “Read Local Eat Local” poetry event sponsored by the Redmond poet laureate, Ching-In Chen, and the Redmond Arts and Culture Commission (my poem is shown online by clicking the 16th dot on the interface). My “Five Food Haiku” poetry postcard was one of 30 distributed at various Redmond restaurants and other businesses starting in September 2024 (mine was available at Spark Pizza in Redmond), with a performance of these poems on 19 September 2024 at the Buoyant Pavilion in Redmond’s Downtown Park as part of the 2024 Downtown Redmond Art Walk (DRAW). See group photo of participating poets below. See also “Food Haiku.”

Valentine’s Day—

a cherry tomato

bursts in my mouth

we walk the boardwalk hand in hand

sharing ice cream

headaches

summer vacation—

our rhubarb stalks

tipped with sugar

after-dinner mints

passed around the table

. . . slow-falling snow

rice chaff

whitens the scoop—

supper alone

Michael Dylan Welch served two terms as poet laureate for the City of Redmond and is currently president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword, which meets at Centro Cultural Mexicano on the last Friday of each month. For 18 years he has also curated the monthly SoulFood Poetry Night open-mic readings on the third Thursday of each month. Michael has been a Jack Straw Writer, a 4Culture grant recipient, and winner and judge of numerous poetry prizes. He directs the annual Seabeck Haiku Getaway for Haiku Northwest, cofounded the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library, and is a founder/director of the biennial Haiku North America conference. He also runs National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com) every February. In 2012, one of his poem translations from the Japanese appeared on the back of 150 million U.S. postage stamps, and in 2013 he was keynote speaker for the Haiku International Association in Tokyo. Michael’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies in at least twenty languages, and he has published 76 books, mostly poetry. Michael’s website is www.graceguts.com.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse