Face Transparent, was published by Contemporary Literary Horizon

My eyes are wild roses underwater.
They disappear every morning and wake up at night tide.

Dangerous ghost love, friends warn me.
Princess Nukuda lays her cheek next to mine,

Curls with me into dawn, on an indigo tatami mat.
Dreams in-between morning and sorrow.

Ono No Komachi, my tears belong to
Poetry and not to love.

I am certain a small corner of paradise endures.

Kiss the water,
Kiss the silvery fish with moon,
Kiss the ghost.

Immortal seasons of love lead into the startling center,
Where Kasa No Iratsume, embraces me with scent of ink.

Cream skin, soft petal soft.

My hair pale, not as white as a rose in moonlight.
The immortals will comfort me.

All of us, beneath a raspberry tinted shawl laughing.
Abandoned, flower growing dream and ghost love.

There is no past, for love this moment awakens,
As the moon rides across the sky in a tantric dance.

The world is covered with plum blossoms,
white, purple fragrance, petals for all.

I offer them to every one as you will not have them.
My indifferent beauty, indifferent song.

A man possessed of Buddha is lost to love.
Why should his lips taste so sweet on mine?

Wild rose under moon, I drown myself,
And do not die because water gives forth life.

Poet of many graces save, love.
Lost perfume lingers through years.

Does this shade of fuchsia honor the immortal robe?

Diane Dehler

luminous ballerina poppies, said Princess Haiku and a poem

The Poppy
Francis Thompson


'Who know not love from amity,
Nor my reported self from me;
A fair fit gift is this, meseems,
You give--this withering flower of dreams.

'O frankly fickle, and fickly true,
Do you know what the days will do to you?
To your Love and you what the days will do,
O frankly fickle, and fickly true?



'You have loved me, Fair, three lives--or days:
'Twill pass with the passing of my face.
But where I go, your face goes too,
To watch lest I play false to you.

'I am but, my sweet, your foster-lover,
Knowing well when certain years are over
You vanish from me to another;
Yet I know, and love, like the foster-mother.

'So frankly fickle, and fickly true!
For my brief life-while I take from you
This token, fair and fit, meseems,
For me--this withering flower of dreams.'
The sleep-flower sways in the wheat its head,
Heavy with dreams, as that with bread:
The goodly grain and the sun-flush'd sleeper
The reaper reaps, and Time the reaper.




I hang 'mid men my needless head,
And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread:
The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper
Time shall reap, but after the reaper
The world shall glean of me, me the sleeper!

Love! love! your flower of wither'd dream
In leaved rhyme lies safe, I deem,
Shelter'd and shut in a nook of rhyme,
From the reaper man, and his reaper Time.

Love! I fall into the claws of Time:
But lasts within a leaved rhyme
All that the world of me esteems--
My wither'd dreams, my wither'd dreams.