[In August Garden]
Summer Haiku for the month of August.
Margaret Roxby was an award-winning poet published internationally in poetry magazines and anthologies, in addition to her two chapbooks, Glass Rain, Golden Rain and Medley. She was a fellow with the World Poetry Society International, local chapter board member of the National League of American Pen Women, and active in the California Federation of Chapparal Poets. She was included in the World Who’s Who of Women, Yearbook of Modern Poetry (1971), and International Who’s Who in Poetry (1971-1973). Margaret was often requested to speak on poetry and to present book reviews to local organizations. Her favorite quote was, “God, you have been good to me. You gave me a love of poetry.”
Margaret also dabbled in prose publishing articles in the Sunday supplement for the Long Beach Independent-Press Telegram newspaper, Los Fierros, a publication of the Los Cerritos Docents. She had a long running column for LBCC General Adult Division newsletter. She authored several more articles, short stories and a science fiction novel.
Margaret was a native of West Virginia where she worked through the 1930’s depression as a typist/clerk typing 200+ wpm. After marriage and the start of WW2, she moved with her husband to Long Beach, California where she worked several years as a secretary. Margaret served several years as a Camp Fire Girls leader and was elected the area’s PTA representative to the state-wide convention. When her son was ready for pre-school, she enrolled in LB City College studying psychology and later creative writing with Alice Wright, founder of a popular, long-running writers’ conference hosted in Long Beach.
Summer Haiku for the month of August.
Sometimes the moon…And sometimes stars surprised…And sometimes, (O, this is best of all)….
Iron dawn rolls out flat unpatterned, rumbles into the colossal caldron…
I see your star light (a gift for me) brilliant dewdrop in the heavens’ sea…time-traveling the destined flight…
When wind is right, there blows across the bright lit sky a fleet that challenges the moon….
I can at times admit some faults…and then repentant cry.
But not all….
…On feet as light and soft as morning a mist across the grass….
A poet’s response to a painting by artist Georgia O’Keefe.
When melancholy, that ancient shadowed sorrow, wanders the mind’s corridors…until through the haunted hours, shines a sudden song,
…Why harbor such remembering: what made the wound, who broke the heart. Why hold we fast the fiery dart that keeps the pain still embering?