Photo-poem: tanka + photograph © 2020
by Roberta Beary. All rights reserved.

not my gay son 
not my son who is gay 
    just my son 
a woman stares until 
the rainbow disappears 

Footnote:

Photograph was taken on the grounds of Westport House in County Mayo, under which lie the remains of one of many castles in Ireland belonging to Grace O’Malley, the Pirate Queen (circa 1530–1603), and later owned by Lord Sligo, one of her descendants. Also on the grounds of Westport House stands a bronze statue of the Pirate Queen by artist Michael Cooper, and within the house, an exhibition on the life of O’Malley compiled by author Anne Chambers.

From Wikipedia (retrieved 3 May 2020):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_O%27Malley

Roberta Beary’s

second collection of short poems, Carousel, is co-winner of the Snapshot Press 2019 book award contest. Her first short-form collection, The Unworn Necklace, received a finalist book award from the Poetry Society of America. Her collection of prose poetry, Deflection (Accents Publishing, 2015), was named a National Poetry Month Best Pick by Washington Independent Review of Books.

Long-time haibun editor of Modern Haiku, Ms. Beary is also co-editor of Wishbone Moon: An Anthology of Haiku by Women (Jacar Press, 2018), and she recently judged the Sable Books Haiku Contest for Women Book Award.

Her writing has appeared in Rattle, KYSO Flash, 100 Word Story, Cultural Weekly, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and is also featured in A Companion to Poetic Genre (John Wiley & Sons, 2011) and Haiku In English: The First Hundred Years (W. W. Norton, 2013).

Ms. Beary lives in the west of Ireland with her husband, Frank Stella, and tweets her photoku and micro-poetry on Twitter [at] shortpoemz.

Author’s website: https://robertabeary.com/news/

You can also find her on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/robertabeary/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The art of brevity, an interview by Ciara Moynihan in Mayo News (22 January 2019)

⚡ Lunch Break, a haibun by Beary in Rattle (#56, Summer 2017), Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness; includes audio (17 July 2017)

⚡ Barfly, one of more than a dozen of Beary’s works which appear in KYSO Flash; for a list of others, see the KF Index of Contributors.