Nice to see Aurora's tanka and Ildi's on haystacks. Wonderful photo! Here's a piece I'm just writing having viewed a number of fields with these cake-like haystacks last weekend. Suggestions/Comments always welcome.
Ray

Haystacks

The haystacks of my boyhood were rectangular bundles, small enough to load by hand on the back of a pickup. There was an intimacy in working with them--the smell of cut grass, the rhythm of lifting and stacking, sweat stinging the eyes, the itch caused by the rough edges, an ice tinkling jug of lemonade at midday break.

Monet's haystacks series, done in rich pastels, represents the play of light at different times and seasons in the fields of his time. While no people are shown, so infused with the human are these images that one easily imagines farmhands scything the grass, forking it into yurt-like piles, cowlicks in their tousled hair, stopping occasionally to munch bread and cheese and to guzzle home brewed beer. 

Today, haystacks are rolls that resemble large golden cakes randomly strewn about the freshly mown fields. There's the same fragrance, but the land has the surrealistic look of a production line, absent of humans, as if the fields have been plundered rather than caressed. 

In one, long lines of bales are wrapped in white plastic, like sausages for a race of giants. I imagine Grant Wood's American Gothic, but without the pitchfork, the house, ultra modern, the wife's countenance, dour, as she puts everything in its right place at the dinner table, the family sitting as if at attention, the talk sanitized, a glass of buttermilk beside each plate. 

sunset
red plastic flowers 
on the war memorial

or

garage cleaning day
a thick layer of dust
on the canning jars

supermarket muzak
garden herbs in
plastic containers

Comments

[Aurora]

Hi Ray,

This is my favourite:

garage cleaning day
a thick layer of dust
on the canning jars

I really like how the prose to this builds, and the various scenes it takes the reader through.

[Matt]

I like the 2nd or 3rd 'ku. This is interesting, Ray.

[kirsty]

I agree with Aurora as to what she says and her choice of haiku.

MY difficulty is thinking of these as 'haystacks'. To me they are all versions of hay bales. Hay stacks, as I know them, are piles of hay that get left in the fields for the animals to browse on. They often take on an eaten-out-in-the-middle shape ( for which there is a geometric term that I can't recall just now..helix?) and are seldom, to never, seen any more..save in old photographs and paintings.

But maybe this is just me?

Kirsty

[Robert]

I vote for no.2 as well. Enjoyed.

[Ray Rasmussen]

Thanks all, and Kristy, especially for the thoughts about bales vs stacks. I'll be editing that in the next draft.
Ray

[Ray Rasmussen]

Sorry for the misspelling Kirsty, my fingers move too fast sometimes.
Ray