-At Geert Verbeke's site, there are these words: "A haiku is a pebble."-

Scrubbing the night away, I watched the water disappear between my toes and down the drain; the smell of coffee spilled down the hallway, reaching me just as I began towling off.
    With a mug, my book and my imagination, I went to the porch where I sat in the morning chill and glanced toward the pond. Reading... I sipped, I glanced and I imagined, and I was prodded by a question in the book, a query that chipped away at my concentration and knotted my desire to absorb the words.
                     "If there is importance in discovery, what is that value?"
                                        

                                        searcher sun
                                        swirrled away the early fog
                                        dizzy eddies

My glances stopped at the tired spade that seemed as a prop for the old cedar where it leaned. It had been there so long I failed to remember how long it had been there... long enough that the handle had become slick and green with moss, the blade rough with rust.                                     

                                        comrads
                                        stood through uncounted time
                                        idle thinkers

I took the spade.
    Stepping to the pond's edge, I slowly hollowed into the pebbled sand, and soon that dampening quarry was two feet across and that much down, and reaching deeply into this hole I chose a stone and rinsed away the clinging grit. It was bubbly, black and glossy, and I imagined it as the product of an ancient volcanic spew, an ort of nature's prehistoric smelters, or the shell of a diamond. I assured myself no one had seen this stone before, and I promised myself... no one would see it again. Other explorers, other searchers and idle dreamers were free to discover their own pebble.

                                        at the edge...
                                        wonder into the earth
                                        the pebble

I tossed my discovery back into its pit. With smug and silly satisfaction, I refilled the gaping void, and after dusting some fresh pond sand to disguise this quarry's scar, I returned that now shiny spade to its companion, and I... to my porch, my book and a fresh mug.

               Floating above my absurdity, an answer to the book's question hovered.
                                      

                                       a bee
                                       found the jelly 
                                       my toast

_M