There are some poems that feel as though they have been waiting for me for a long time. I found one in the 2007 Haiku poetry collection A Voyage of My Mind … by Istanbul-born Fureya Ersoy, now living in London. It is a nameless haiku poem, so delicate it almost dissolved as I read it: “raindrops on roses flamboyant pearls of nature— till the sun comes out” There is something simply miraculous about haiku, like the way it distills a moment so precisely that time seems to hesitate. Three unrhymed lines, 17 syllables, and yet it is an entire world: the cool weight of raindrops, the soft yielding of petals, the shimmer of something that will not last. I was no longer reading. I was remembering. The phrase “raindrops on roses” carries its own memory, doesn’t it? It’s a gentle thread back to the 1965 movie The Sound of Music, and to Julie Andrews singing with that crystalline clarity that defined so much of my childhood. The song, My Favorite Things, was a catalogue of comfort, a list of a few of the singer’s pet likes, such as raindrops on roses and schnitzel with noodles. But here, in Ersoy’s haiku, the raindrops are no longer simply comforting. They are “flamboyant pearls of nature” and extravagant, almost excessive in their beauty. There is something sensual in that phrase, something tactile. You can feel the roundness of the droplets, see the way they cling to the petal, trembling to the rose before surrendering to gravity or light. And then, the line “till the sun comes out.” Everything is temporary. That is the truth at the heart of the poem. The pearls will vanish. The roses will dry. The moment dissolves even as we witness it. Perhaps that is why it lingers with me. Because I have always been drawn to the fleeting, the half-seen, the spaces between presence and absence, this haiku feels like standing at a window just after rain, when the world is both sharpened and softened, when light begins to return but hasn’t yet claimed everything. Again, it is a memory of being in Aunt Jeanne’s cottage garden in Normandy, France, after a brief shower of rain on her roses. It is a poem that asks nothing of you except to notice. But noticing the ordinary, it becomes luminous. The familiar becomes strange again. Even a childhood melody returns, altered, and less about comfort now, and more about impermanence. A poem about how beauty intensifies precisely because it cannot stay. I think that is why this poem feels like it belongs to me, in some unspoken way. It holds the exact tension I recognize in my own life; the desire to preserve moments, and the understanding that they are most alive because they slip through our fingers. “raindrops on roses” … Not forever then Though just long enough but surely forever now
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Saturday, 28 March 2026
A haiku poem, a memory of long ago …
Thursday, 19 March 2026
Spring and a duckling held in two hands
In a classroom in England, something extraordinary happened. Ducklings hatched. There is a reason eggs and ducklings feel inseparable from spring. This is the season of beginning again. As daylight lengthens in the Northern Hemisphere, birds respond almost immediately. Their internal rhythms signal that it is time to nest, to lay eggs, to begin the fragile process of bringing new life into the world. Eggs are, perhaps, the most perfect symbol of this. What is remarkable about ducklings, and all hatchlings, is how quickly they cross the threshold from stillness to movement. Inside the egg, it waits. Suddenly, there is tapping, a crack, and a ball of yellow feathers emerge. There are small, fascinating details that make this moment even more extraordinary. Ducklings can communicate from inside the egg before they hatch, making soft sounds to synchronize with one another. They are born with the instinct to follow movement, which is why they imprint so quickly on the first figure they see. And within hours, they can walk, swim, and explore with surprising independence for something so newly arrived. There is a phrase for this season: spring chicken. In this situation: spring duckling. Originally, spring chicken meant exactly what it sounds like: a young bird hatched in spring, new to the world and full of life. As we age, the phrase becomes a reversal: I’m no spring chicken. And yet, standing in a classroom with a newly hatched duckling resting in small hands, the phrase feels closer to its original meaning again: not about age, but about being at the very beginning of something new, however briefly. Children know instinctively how to hold a newly hatched bird: carefully, curiously, and with a kind of reverence, as if they know they are holding a new beginning in their hands. Sometimes, we can hold spring in two hands.
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Renoir and the Art of Love and Joy at the Paris exhibition 2026
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