Simply Haiku, December 2003, Volume 1, Number 6

Kevin Ryan is a multi-disciplinary artist who has been involved in the community arts movement in the UK since 1976. He is the Director of Charnwood Arts, an arts and media educational charity based in the town of Loughborough in central England. Kevin is married with four offspring, two grown up daughters and two boys still at home. Somewhere in the middle of all this he finds time to write which he has been doing since he was a teenager.

Kevin's current interest in aiming to write haiku has been greatly inspired by his friend Paul Conneally, meetings with Debi Bender and Susumu Takiguchi and the on-line presence of the World Haiku Club. He has only one memory of reading a book about haiku, when he was about fifteen, and claims to think that the word PLOP! is still the most memorable word of any poem that he has ever read.

powerhouse -
a blood red sun sets
between the coolers

frozen ears -
not even the rustle of leaves
to disturb the stars

names of the dead -
shadows dance across
the pavement

scree slope -
last crop of grass
before the summit

frost melt -
the flock graze around
scattered remains

river dove -
in all the sky
not a bird

distant dogs -
alone in a valley
crowned with sunlight

deep in the dale -
small things like the absence
of sound

my breath -
the stillness of
willow

hill farm -
beyond the lamp's glow
endless darkness