The washing machine
Slaps and pummels green trees
In a wet window
What a gift! Instead of work, to lie in bed and listen to the sound of a natural storm raging in the world outside.
Roaring. Raindrops chasing across the window .The low moan of the wind, hoovering the trees. In bed, the soft sweet smell of sleep and night-time sweat. The wind rises … a long aargh ... and then the swish of rain on leaves and the fresh lines of raindrops on the window pane.
The raindrops merge and fall on the vertical face of glass. It looks like the one raindrop at the top of the window is the same as the raindrop at the bottom. Easy to confuse the passage of raindrops with the tracer from an airliner in a blue sky or the wake of a boat in a blue sea.
Splatter spit and roar
Through a thick veil of rain
The hunkered city
There is a book on the bed: Zen in Plain English. ‘It was of even greater importance to them to bring their disciples to the point of experiencing that the holy, the essential ‘ Buddha nature’ is completely manifested at any moment in any things, and that, as Hongren said, “everything in its true nature incorporates the whole truth”.’
Reading left to right raindrop
races
top to
bottom
Sheltering; the bed is warm, a slight red wine headache and heaviness. Imagine what it must be like outside: wind on the face and the sting of raindrops. Raindrops! In the moment. They exist only in the moment and are never separate. ‘Without water there is no ice, without ice no water’.
In films, they sometimes dramatize attacks on a computer system by having the written lines on a screen dissolve and then fall to the bottom … like raindrops on a window.
After the attacks
Raindrops chase lines
In window glass
Lovely description of the storm and of being warm in bed while it rages on outside. Love the hunkered city, the Zen reflections, and the way the piece is elevated at the end by the reference to what might be the ransomware computer virus or the Manchester attacks, and the rain keeps falling. Nice link. I might suggest the first line of prose goes before the first haiku? The first haiku was great but I took it literally to be a washing machine until I realized the setting and then saw it as the storm outside the window?
Hi Jonathon,
Good to see you at last on the new forum. I was beginning to feel that me and George had it all to ourselves.
A vivid animated description of a storm andI also love the "humkered city". However, I don't understand the first haiku and feel that "hoovering the trees" is out of place. I'm also not sure if the Zen and film references add anything significant.
Best wishes, Stuart.
Dear Jonathan
The viewpoint from bed, or rather listening point from bed, on the storm is lovely and the storm is vivid. I like the hunkered city. I don't get anything from the third paragraph, which does not give me a clear picture or a clear idea of what you are getting at with the one at the top and the one at the bottom and seems incoherent. The thing leaps back wonderfully into focus for me with, 'Raindrops! In the moment. They exist only in the moment and are never separate. ‘Without water there is no ice, without ice no water’.' Which is zen in the moment not zen as idea.
If you are going to get the ending to work as Heather tentatively describes it, as image for destructive attacks, I'm going to have to see paragraph three much more clearly: what is it about the way raindrops move on the pane that becomes the metaphor? Love, George