Calon/Hearts...

...these are all photographs of hearts I have encountered on the ground, in their natural composition. Each have been taken and processed only with an iPhone and are presented in a relationship with their own, small, poem in a contemporary interpretation on the Japanese form 'haiga'.

This project is now well into its second year of creation, with over a hundred images/verses having been archived. Some of the hearts are solid, made of stone; others are more ephemeral, being of paper or a pattern in the grass. Some have been given to me by strangers who have heard about the project. All represent the many ways in which love takes form in our everyday world, often going quite unnoticed.

The autumm is here
with a heart darkened by fire,
warmed by memory
and shaped by the weight of time
- a landscape held in your hearth.

The sea has a secret lover
She keeps him in her pocket
Like a jewel
The land will never know.

On the battlefield
A love is born that does not
Cry. With no body
To hold, it waits, a seed, for
Peace to rain, or war to yield.

The earth has a heart of stone.
Her skin is yesterday's mud
And her hair a tangle of grass you think your own.
The earth has a heart of stone.

Velvet is the sea

and velvet is her skin

a seal sleeping beneath the shore

with a heart of blue

stolen from a Northern sky.

Cry, heart, but never break
Let tears not the future take.
Fly with the leaving, yet return
And fold with love, in life to learn
That yearning is a gift of death
It sweetens every beat and breath
And loss may settle on the ground
Where others walk, so care is bound
To let joy, now, the future make
And cry, heart, but never break.

In response to Gelnn Ringtved and Charlotte Pardi's children's book

Some hearts can never

be buried, defying words,

re-seeding new ground.

The fire has a heart
Of ash, whose memory burns
In a waiting hand.

I once held something

that thought it was a heart - but

it was mishapen.

The trees wore love on their sleeves
Like copper wedding vows
Until time grew hungry
And they had to feed the wind
With their children's discarded clothes.