The Idea of God

a golden shovel incorporating a Bashō haiku

 

A simple syllable with the force of many: no.

You have had your way, like one

leading the blind on stub-toed travels.

 

Was that the secret to getting along?

Now this.

I recall all the twists and curbs, know my way

around without your vigilant guidance, but

you can’t wait for me to fall: See, I

 

told you so. Watch me step from under this

bright streetlight, inhale the wild autumn,

and wander without fear into evening.

 

 

 

Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships; and the editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga, and Wingbeats II. Recent poems have appeared in Decades Review, Red Earth Review, Pinyon Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and the anthologies This Assignment Is So Gay, Forgetting Home: Poems about Alzheimer’s, and The Great Gatsby Anthology. He is an editor for Dos Gatos Press of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

 

 

 

For more information about the golden shovel poetic form, click here.