Lily Hearth

What can I add to
one who was in every way
true to her own name?

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2025)

Note
This transpired as a response to the daily haiku prompt for May 5, 2025.

What’s that stench?

Is is that painful
smell of someone so rich he
denies his own farts?

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2025)

Note
Where exactly this one came from I don’t know. However, I’ve been thinking a lot about these times and some of the rich and powerful personalities they feature oh so prominently. Bluntly put: they do not smell good.

To each its own

 

Complained the crocus:
Rain again! Water, water,
water – so boring!

The sardine: Feels like
heaven. My element! – I
like it, and salty!

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2024)

Note
Today’s haiku prompt was this juxtaposition: crocus (North) and sardine (South). I decided to travel both ways.

Haiku mishap

Was going to type 
furry cricket but then wrote
flurry cricket. Brain!

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2025)

Note
That’s what I did about the suggestion for 2/23/2025 from Daily Haiku Prompt.

 

Instant recognition

Meryl Streep with the
most outlandish hat ever
and Klaus Maria Brandauer,
white-hatted colonial style,
among black people
speaking Italian on TV 
in a Roman bar. Well,
if it ain’t Out of Africa!

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2025)

Notes
Based on genuine recent experience during a walk.
Refers to the 1985 movie Out of Africa starring Meryl Streep as Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), Klaus Maria Brandauer and Robert Redford, which won 7 (!) Academy awards. It's weathered a bit – somehow I don’t believe it would win that many awards nowadays.

What is the title of this poem?

 But, more importantly, what is its content?

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2024)

Note
Inspired by a similarly titled poem by Kathryn Bevis, which has lots of detailed content, I came across at the Poetry Society UK site. I decided to not only question the title of the poem but also the content, thus taking it up one notch.

The drab streets haiku

 

Read today we should
all be grateful for any-
thing and everything

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2024)

Note
I really did read that today somewhere on the oh so social media. “Anything and everything” would include drab streets, right? Like the Roman street with its crumbling brutalist architecture eternalized in the photo above.

PS:
Anyone interested in drab street photos like the one shown here please get in touch!

A lazy Sunday afternoon haiku

 

Sunny afternoon,
late January. At home
alone, cat sleeping.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2024)

Note
Razor edge of time reporting, glimpse of a time span that lasted for a while. I’d actually planned to write this in my head before I even got home. I knew that the cat would be sleeping. He does that about 16 hours out of 24.

Photography haiku

 

Found out this morning
I have neither spider web 
photos nor smoke pix

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2024)

Notes
I’ve been known to participate in some photography challenges where you’re invited to post a photo to match a given topic. This made me realize that I have nothing suitable for at least two topics. The above smoky picture is actually a fake – the interior of this room looks smoky but in reality the smoke was the result of a dirty window through which I shot the photo. As to spider web photos, I have nothing to show. Must try to look for webs!

Critical Can Opener

 

There’s nothing wrong
with this poem.
No need to look for it.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2024)

Note
A variation of Richard Brautigan’s poem of the same title, in which he says “There is something wrong with this poem. Can you find it?” (Quoted from Brautigan’s collection Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt from 1970.)

6 lines

A grinder
is digging into the wall
painfully

And there’s
nothing
I can do about it

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2023)

Note
The reported truth and nothing but. I could have added “except write a pedestrian poem about it”, but then it would have been more than 6 lines. And we wouldn't want that, would we?

Blue

 

The year’s first haiku

Bla ble bli blo blu.

Foreign: blé blö blä blò blù.

And so are you too.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2023)

Note
Undoubtedly not a good start. Or is it? Symbolisms galore in the photo: something in the mirror while getting passed by the future.

My Halloween Haiku

Unbreak my heart, sang

the grey monster chained up at 

the dark Illy bar.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)

Note
First-hand experience in Rome this afternoon as the whole city is getting ready for the carved pumpkin festival.

Photo by David Menidrey on Unsplash

Pardon me

 

  

if I sound naive, 
but is baited breath like bad
breath? Would like to know.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

Gianmaria Testa: Aerial View

 

Gianmaria Testa (right) in concert with Paolo Fresu. Ludwigsburg castle,
Germany, June 2011. Photo by Johannes Beilharz.

Aerial View

Of this aerial view 
Almost nothing remains
The ghost of the steeple 
No longer smiles
Gliding over the ancient hills 
Again and again
You meet nothing 
But worn-out straw hats
The glasses are empty 
But no one notices
The glasses are empty 
And no one notices.
And you
What will you do tomorrow
And you
What will you do tomorrow

Of this season gone I won't forget anything 
Unless September insists 
On erasing it
Talking again and again 
About what has just been 
I unwillingly wipe the salt 
Off my hands
The glasses were full 
And someone emptied them
The glasses were full 
But someone emptied them
Now I know 
What you'll do tomorrow
Now I know 
What you'll do tomorrow

– Gianmaria Testa (1958-2016)

Title of Italian original: Veduta aerea. Translated by Johannes Beilharz (© 2022). The song is from the album Altre Latitudini of 2003.

The following video shows Gianmaria Test performing the song at another venue in the same area of Germany (Baden-Württemberg), the Franz K. in Reutlingen (May 4, 2010). 

The snot catcher haiku

   

Silver horseshoe 
dangling from mademoiselle’s
dainty little nose.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)

Note
I occasionally wonder whether there is a practical reason for this facial jewelry...

The unfashionable haiku

    

  Dedicated to my dear wife

“No-one except you
wears wide cord pants – I don’t want
to be seen with you!”

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)

The don’t take toilet breaks haiku

Went to the toilet. Came
back – a job had come and gone.
Lucky someone else.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)

Note
Once again: the truth and nothing but.
In today's fast-paced always-on environment, going to the toilet for a minute or two can make the difference between getting and losing out on a job.
And I didn’t even go golfing! (Reference to Gary Kildall of Digital Research, developer of CP/M, an early PC-age rival of MS-DOS. Supposedly he turned down a meeting with IBM because he preferred to go golfing. The lucky winner was Bill Gates of Microsoft, who did have time for IBM and sold them on his operating system. This is the story as I remember hearing it in the 1980s - veracity not guaranteed.)

The corona haiku

 

Life dictated by 

fever and saturation 

readings – sheer terror.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)

Note
Some reality from my battle with the virus. A bloody oxygen reading of less than 90%, so the doctors say, means you should be hospitalized.

I’m doing nearly nothing

Ab Har Ho Bhola Nahin Bane - Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur

Fourth day of dreamily

listening to Mallikarjun Mansur -

always the same songs.

Nothing much is happening – 

I’m not listening attentively.

The music is flowing into me.

It feels like a conspicuous momentary

constellation – Mallikarjun Mansur singing

and me doing the equivalent of happy nothing.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)