Poetry Friday--A New Project!

Chap-Books of the Eighteenth Century With Facsimiles, Notes, and Introduction by John Ashton (1882) was a lucky find for me at Open Library. I spent a number of hours looking through it, and discovered some great woodcut illustrations. I was inspired to use the illustrations and pair them with poems. This has resulted in a number of haiga (haiku/senryu with illustrations) and illustrated short poems. I'll be sharing them over the next few months, mostly on Sundays, which are Happy Haiga Day! here at Random Noodling.

This first one is a senryu written right after Christmas and is based upon a real incident from Christmas Day.

In Chap-Books, I came across The History of Sir Richard Whittington Thrice Lord Mayor of London. The cat in the illustration below, looked more dog-like to me and I thought it would work well with my poem.

[Note: you may know the legend of "Dick Whittington and His Cat," which was the subject of children's books by Robert Lawson (1949), Marcia Brown (1988), and Margaret Hodges (2006).]

© Diane Mayr, all rights reserved. Illustration source, click here.

Text:

first time
meeting the family
he brings his dog


Here's another:

© Diane Mayr, all rights reserved. Illustration source, click here.

Text:

Mephisto
the crowd still expects
he'll remove his mask

Violet Nesdoly | Poems is this week's Poetry Friday hostess. Do stop by.