about haiku

I started writing verse in the 5 syllable, 7 syllable, 5 syllable format when I had vertigo and couldn’t get up to write things down.  My fingers could remember things my head couldn’t.  I called it haiku. Most of what I wrote was a form of whining:

my brain spins.  I fall

awry.  bitter thoughts creep in

like patient roaches.

dreary morning  still

in bed  hungry  the kitchen

is a long way off

woman with floaters

in her eyes waves away gnats

that aren’t really there

woman with floaters

smashes a gnat on the page

relieved that it’s real

Once my fingers started, they wouldn’t stop. My son, for example, loves jalapeños, which make his sinuses drain.  One day at supper he referred to his “snot rag.”

“Excuse my snot rag,”

son teases his mother, then

“These are the good days.”

I accumulated a lot of verse in this form, and when I did my book, I stuck some of it in. Then I started my blog and made the extravagant promise to talk about haiku.  I Googled “Haiku” and found out I don’t know squat about it.

This in a nutshell is what I’ve learned.  Haiku is an old Japanese poetic form that gets updated every century or so, more often these days.  Some is very formal and follows strict rules.  Usually it evokes a scene, something from nature that suggests a season and implies an emotion or a sudden insight.  Whoa!  I’ve been using a thoroughbred to haul rocks.  Or presenting dyed Easter eggs and calling them Fabergé.  

There’s something about the haiku form that attracts poets from all over the world.  And there are new conventions in English haiku all the time.  I fell in love with haiku when I saw this poem on a poster:

Since my house burned down

I now have a better view

Of the rising moon.

                  ― Mizuta Masahide

I don’t know if it was luck that Masahide’s poem fits our English form so well or if it was an acrobatic translation. Japanese doesn’t have syllables like English does. I still think of this poem when I see a moon rise.

I also love this image by Kobayashi Issa, translated by Jane Hirshfield:

On a branch

    floating downriver       

a cricket, singing.

And this modern one by Kato Shuson on Reddit:

I kill an ant

and realize my three children

have been watching.

There’s lots of haiku on the web.  These three by George Ochsenfeld follow the 5-7-5 convention:

thirsty mosquito

lands on a cold stone Buddha

the end of craving

smoking my crack pipe

also known as a smartphone

where did my life go?

time is on our side

sang the youthful Rolling Stones

wrinkled prunes on tour

Poetry magazine published a sequence called “Ceasefire Haiku” by Faisal Mohnyuddin. The first poem reads:

All night, the somber

Song of chimes. The winter wind

Grieves for Gaza too.

And finally, from Poetry, Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman,

the opening verse from her haiku sequence by Sonia Sanchez:

Picture a woman

riding thunder on the

legs of slavery    ...    

You can see the potential of the form.  I’ll keep on writing my haphazard haiku because it’s fun.  But you’ll know I know better.