Rose Anna Higashi’s poetry explores the motif of travel—through time, place, imagination and metaphor. She was born in Joplin Missouri on old U.S. Highway 66. She taught Poetry, English Literature and Japanese Literature at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose for thirty-five years, writing, traveling and publishing poetry all the while. Her third volume of poetry, Searching in Circles, was published in 2025 by Kelsay Books the day after the death of Rose Anna’s only son, David Higashi. She is co-author with her niece, Kathleen Pedulla, of the website myteaplanner.com, on which many of her haiku and lyric poems are published, along with her blog, “Tea and Travels.” A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry has been widely published in journals and online sites such as Poets Online, Verse-Virtual, America Media, The Ekphrastic Review, The Fixed and Free Quarterly and others. Rose Anna lives in Honolulu with her husband Wayne Higashi.
For Dad, An Elegy
The rains began the day of your death,
And the piper, gritty as a highlander,
Stood in the drizzle
To pipe your coffin into the grave.
Now you rest beneath a pepper tree
Safe in the sweet damp earth.
I will miss the way you loved to look at trees,
The way you noticed shades of gray
In the winter sky.
You would have marveled at today’s mist
And the bright blossoms
Just being born among the deep
Azalea leaves.
From Searching in Circles
Dear Rose Anna: The Poet Celebrates Herself
I’ve been lucky.
I was born in the Ozarks with a caul over my head.
Everybody back there knows that a girl born with a caul
Will be clairvoyant. That’s a big word for the Ozarks,
But everyone knows what it means. I always felt
Just a little special, like I carried a secret locket in my heart.
My name was another lucky gift, a beautiful name
That I never resented or wanted to change.
Other people changed it for me.
Grandpa always called me Rosie, but that was okay,
Because he bought me more fireworks than any girl could
Dream of and let me shoot them off all by myself all day
And all night every Fourth of July, and I never blew my
Fingers off. That was another stroke of luck.
My husband just calls me Rose, and that’s all right too,
Because he grew up in Japan where a person’s middle name
Is private. When my family finally got to California,
Everybody there was in such a hurry, they couldn’t even be
Bothered to say their whole first name when they met you.
They called themselves Mo and Tori and Dru, half of a name,
And you never learned what their last name was,
Like their parents and grandparents didn’t matter at all.
They matter to me. If Rose Anna, my great-grandmother,
Hadn’t immigrated from Ireland, I wouldn’t be Rose Anna at all,
And neither would the other three Rose Annas named after her.
They’re all dead now, and I’m getting closer.
I think about it every day. When my dad was the age
I am now, he had been dead for three years,
But my mother had twelve more years to live.
Where am I on this scale? I don’t know.
I’m not really that clairvoyant.
I do know I’m lucky to have a son who still loves me
And a husband who’s stuck by me for sixty plus years.
I don’t want to get greedy. I’m no Louise Gluck
Who won every poetry prize on Earth, but it would
Be nice if I could be as lucky as Emily Dickinson
Or Gerard Manley Hopkins, who both had somebody
Who cared about them even after they were dead,
And knew how to send their poems out into the world.
That would really be lucky if my poetry still floated around
For a while after I’m off with all the other Rose Annas.
From Searching in Circles
Gerard’s Journey to Joplin
Author’s note: In this dramatic monologue in the form of an expanded and Counterpointed Italian sonnet, the British Victorian Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, inadvertently finds himself in Joplin Misssouri, Gateway to the Ozarks and birthplace of the American poets, Langston Hughes and Rose Anna Higashi.
Oh, the wonder of it! Even the names
Of the little pubs are a glory-journey!
Wendy’s—puffing my spirit up in cumulous-curious,
Zephyring the scent of potatoes over
The vast mystic highway. Macdonald’s—calling
Clans and thoughts of plaids red and russeter
Than the dark dawn over Hadrian’s Wall,
Recalling pipes like angel-hawks squawking
Out God’s muster in picnic-places and
Refectories. There too is Grace in August’s inferno,
The air itself a baptism in the bath of God.
There is a moisture I have never imagined,
And even in empty lots where the walkways crack
With the up-pushing roots of elms, there is life.
And more life—vines and mosses, mimosa sprout
And catalpa beans, dangling like the fingers of Christ.
In sagging roofs and crumbling brick, the Spirit
Her very self weighs down with an instress
So stimulating that even the cats seem caught in prayer—
How can the humans help but be holy?
From Searching in Circles
Circumnavigating the Mountain
You will thresh the mountains and crush them,
And you will reduce the hills to chaff.
Isiah 41:15
A load of laundry can be a mountain.
So can all those texts and emails
Piled up in our files.
We tell ourselves they are urgent
Though we imagine the golden moon guiding us
To the fullness of all our dreams someday.
Far away from his workplace,
A painter in the chilly morning gazes
At the distant peaks and the valley covered with
Conifers. He breathes in the deep green scent
As he stands before the tallest pine, his palette
With all his colors in his hands. Will this be his day?
He hears a jay, then a woodpecker, but his watch
Vibrates, and he glances away from a squirrel,
Scurrying by, an acorn in her cheek.
The artist walks back through the forest and returns
To the parking lot, then back again to his cubicle.
What is it that drives us away from the world
Of breathless risk to the safety of coffee
And conversation, to the phone in our hand
That controls our attention?
Choosing the right shade of green can be as terrifying
As releasing our secret voice to sing with the skylarks.
Listening to the chimes that echo through our slumber
Just before dawn lifts us only for a golden moment.
Then we see the mountain when we open our eyes.
Is it possible to watch in darkness,
Eyes closed, ears open? Can we hear
The holy mists, like incense, wafting the barriers
Away, and stand with Claude and Vincent in the starlight,
Dipping our brush in the deepest pink
Before the waterlilies can even be seen?
From Verse-Virtual
At Our Lady of Peace in San Jose with a Disabled Veteran
Slowly, we both limp, as quietly as we can, into the silent church, filled
With desperate prayers, thundering in God’s ears. We hold on to the back
Of each pew for balance and find a spot in the middle. The candles are
Lighted, and the consecrated host gleams in the gold monstrance like the full moon.
One woman prostrates herself in the center aisle, like a priest at his own ordination.
Another woman lifts her hands and waves them urgently as she kneels at the altar.
A young man in dusty work clothes settles in the pew in front of us.
He is dressed like the older men who stand outside hardware stores,
Looking for work. His worn boots face us as he kneels. Jesus, barefoot and bloody,
Looks down at this young man from the crucifix. The wooden pew is hard
On my back, increasing the daily pain, but I sense wind and wings surrounding
Us, and I realize that this young man is not praying for work, but like everyone in this
Sacred place, he is praying for safely, to avoid being captured, kicked and imprisoned by
Masked intruders obeying cruel commands. Mary knows their fear, as she was forced
To flee in darkness to save her new-born son, swaddled under her mantle. She gazes down
At all of us now. I take a deep breath, and exhale a huge petition for the crowd around us,
And for you and me. I remember the summer day long ago when we climbed Mount Fuji Together, a young mother and her teenaged son, healthy and strong. No one treated us
As strangers or looked at us oddly because we didn’t have hiking boots and our clothes
Could not protect us from the cold as we ascended, with hundreds of others, into the clouds. Somehow, after hours of exhaustion and shivering, we stood up, alone, the only two
In all of Japan, who made it to the top of Mount Fuji on that chilly morning fifty years
Ago. We looked down past green rice fields, cherry trees with all their spring blossoms
Gone, and the bullet train on the horizon, speeding toward Kyoto. We did not trip and fall
Off Mount Fuji when we were young, but afflictions have befallen us over time.
Now, in this place among the persecuted, with our brothers and sisters whose
Suffering is worse than ours, we lift our hearts with gratitude for every moment of hope.
From The Fixed and Free Quarterly, Albuquerque, New Mexico
The Galway Review 