Everett F. Briggs

Monongah, West Virginia

Everett has written published poetry since his late teen years. A retired clergyman, he is administrator of a nursing home. Interned in Japan, he later served as professor of Japanese, in the U.S. Navy V-12 Training Program. He has written Haiku poems published in Japanese journals. His English poetry has been published in American journals since 1925. ACROSS THE BRIDGE, an anthology of some 650 poems, conventional and Haiku, was published in 1996. It is Everett's twelfth book. Six were written in Japanese. "Poetry is a joy. It brings me closer to the ancestral soul of things, worldwide."

Afterglow

Back home again, I strolled the fields
Where I once roamed, in childhood days,
When bush and flowers, even weeds
Spelled beauty, in the sun's first rays.

But now the pampas grass is thin;
The wild rose has grown subtly old;
Bush-clover nods unsteady head
As over earth steals stealthy cold.

Long gone the gentian, goldenrod,
The blue and gold of perfumed fields.
My still young heart my now old age
From disappointment blithely shields.

Fragrant Still

Ah, My place of birth!
Lilacs lavender the same
Perfuming the earth.
From the arbor there,
Breathes the lusciousness
of grapes,
Purpling all the air.
From the garden bare,
Comes the smell of mint
and thyme,
Through the years still rare.
But this attar faint...
This more subtle than
them all?
This fit for a Saint?
Rose of scent divine...
In your hair that small,
gay bloom,
Long-gone mother mine!

Haiku

Little brother, long-gone ­
the river water is cold,
this summer afternoon

Osana-kimi yuki-te tsumetaki natsu-no kawa