Stuart Duffield
This new year brings a continuing treat – the second in our series featuring a Haiku Student Poet of the Month from among Tom Painting’s students at The Paideia School in Atlanta. (You can read more about this award-winning poet and teacher here and meet our first featured student poet, Emma Jones, here.)
Today’s featured poet wowed the adult attendees at our recent Haiku Society of America Southeast Region ginko haikufest in Atlanta in October. Please welcome Stuart Duffield.
Stuart was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was raised in
Atlanta Georgia, where he currently attends The Paideia School. He was
first introduced to haiku by his 7th and 8th grade literature teacher,Tom
Painting, and has loved it ever since. Stuart’s other hobbies and
interests include general fitness, swimming, hiking, computer hardware,
and fashion.
Stuart shares a few of his thoughts about the genre:
It is often the most ordinary and common moments in my life that
haiku captures with its full breadth. These moments, many times ignored in
my fast paced life, are often most worthy of my attention, not because of
the immediate satisfaction of capturing the intricacies of nature in a
single breath, but rather the comfort it provides when I am most removed
from the things I love. Through this perspective, beauty is no longer
bound by the spindling webs of social structures and culture, but freed by
the feel of warm, moist sand underneath your feet, the warm breath blown
over the tip of your nose, the winds whipping at your cheeks and the
syncopated beats of crickets at dusk.
Now, please enjoy some of Stuart’s poems:
desert road
a javelina hides
behind a prickly pear
lazy afternoon
the cat
watches the bird feeder
desert sunrise
a cactus wren calls
from the ocotillo
sunlight through the garage window
the first chords
kick up dust
train whistle
ravens burden
a leafless tree
All poems ©Stuart Duffield. All rights reserved.
Many thanks to Stuart for sharing his fine work here this week!
Thanks as well to the Delightful Donna, hosting the Poetry Friday Roundup today at Mainely Write.