First steps

A collaborative haiku — “To The Moon”

Renga is a form of collaborative haiku with a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable structure. A single writer initiates the poem with the first 5-7-5 stanza and welcomes other writers to provide the 7-7 stanza.

Anyone can submit the 7-7 lines! For the sake of all renga participants, please include your lines as comments to the collaborative haiku post so that others can see what has been submitted. I will “close” the renga to submissions on the date indicated with the collaborative haiku post.  I will have an independent judge pick their favorite from the submissions. The final renga will be published on this blog, and the submitter will be given co-credit with me in the by-line.

The submission deadline is early this time: 5 pm EDT, Fri, August 31, 2012.  My hope is to post the final haiku on NASA’s “Share Your Thoughts on Neil Armstrong” page at http://www.nasa.gov/topics/people/features/armstrong_comments.html before the public comment period ends.

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Apollo 11 astronauts (left to right: Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin) at Kennedy Space Center (Saturn V in the background) on May 20, 1969. Credit: NASA

To The Moon

We choose to go, too,
because your words awaken
a slumbering child.
Your 7 syllable line here
Next 7 syllable line here.

Step

One of few pictures of Neil Armstrong on the Moon. Taken by Buzz Aldrin, July 20, 1969. Credit: NASA.

— for Neil, with thanks

A step
before I was born
led to another

and another

until a path
wore through the book
on our shelf

and I sat on the floor
with black-and-white
family portraits

of the moon

as if reliving
a vacation
to the beach

this intimacy
treading
into the night
when I trained
my binoculars
on a black sea
stripped of childhood
haze–

on a suspended
rock, falsely lit

and somewhere
in my focus:
a step.