Seven Haiku
Calm seas of green grass
waft periwinkle fleets past
dandelion reefs.
A summer Sunday.
We pass, faces in the crowd,
unrequited love.
What friends are my books,
that blunt a bitter evening’s
existential edge.
Zeno’s paradox
is—Zeno’s paradox is—
Zeno’s paradox—
A Haiku Cycle
What is it you seek,
you that dwell where edges blur,
where the shadows pool?
Do you seek God there,
as though you’re more than human
but not yet divine?
Or are you fleeing
eyes, hands, and lips that love, but
makes demands of, you?
Prosodic Postlude
In high school, I was taught that a haiku is an unrhymed poem with three lines of 5 syllables, then 7, and then 5, respectively. Given the unfortunate penchant for prolixity in my writing, I found the challenge of expressing a complex thought or emotion in no more than seventeen syllables invigorating. I’ve been dashing off haiku ever since.
It wasn’t until this past January, however, that I discovered how disciplined a poetic form the haiku can be. Through my burgeoning love for Akira Kurosawa, I discovered Matsuo Bashō, the “father of the haiku.” Bashō was a 17th century Japanese poet and, latterly, an itinerant practitioner of Zen Buddhism. He wandered around medieval Japan, writing Zen-suffused travel journals about his peregrinations in charmingly blunt prose, and interspersing haiku he had written along the way.
Several of his best journals are anthologized in The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, edited by Nobuyuki Yuasa. Thanks to Yuasa’s introduction, I learned that in Bashō’s time, a haiku had two defining features: “First, a reference to the season in which it is written, and second, the existence of the so-called ‘breaking word’ (kireji), a short emotionally charged word which, by arresting the flow of poetic statement for a moment, gives extra strength and dignity.” (p. 14)
Certainly, I had not been following those two rules. Since then, I’ve attempted to abide by them with varying degrees of fidelity — and I’ve begun to notice how much room for creativity they still provide. One can, for instance, stretch the requirement for “a reference to the season in which it is written” to fanciful extremes, like referring to the moon by its monthly names (Snow moon, Wolf moon, Harvest moon, etc.), or naming flowers specific to spring, summer, or autumn. Those are both techniques in Bashō, Buson, and Issa, three of the most virtuosic writers of haiku in Japanese.
The haiku above were taken, in no particular order, from the many I have written in the last ten years. Very few observe Bashō’s rules, but fault me not: I’m young yet, and still becoming.
The image for this post is a portrait of Bashō by Hokusai, of Great Wave fame.
