This is a slideshow with Poetry. Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth, Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant, 14 Haiku by John Battle, The last lines of Lieutenant Lasset, a teleplay by John Battle. Tintern Abbey opens at 00:00 with: “Five years have passed.” Thanatopsis opens at 11:17 with: “To him who in the love of Nature.” My haiku open at 16:55 with: “Corn stalks quiver.” The last lines of Lieutenant Lasset open at 19:24 with: “Eternity foreclosed on a moment.” The slideshow features my nature photos taken over the years, some from film, some digital.

I added my own works to fill the slideshow up. I include haiku—three-line nature poems—and a little fiction narrative from my Amazon book titled Overone. I lived in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s: I contributed regularly to Haiku-In-English, a weekly feature of Mainichi Daily News. See the copies here. I showed these pages to my father when he was in his eighties. He loved poetry. He was duly impressed by these short works of mine.

I remember teaching an executive-level, English-Conversation class at Toyota Motor Company and spending a bit of time discussing my respect for haiku. I wrote some of these on the blackboard. The students seemed to want more examples of the ones I had been writing for the weekly English-language Haiku feature in Mainichi Daily News, a daily English-Language newspaper that I subscribed to. Finally, the members of this seminar-style class seemed to surrender to my proclivity for haiku when I put this one up:

After the typhoon
Corn plants quiver in the breeze
—The air is so clear