lake big as an ocean
those stones you throw
will never return
Edited 6/5/10:
This one doesn’t seem quite right to me. How about:
ripples on the lake
those stones you throw
will never return
or
arriving waves
those stones you throw
will never return
Votes and comments welcome below.
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“those stones you throw / will never return” — maybe they will? But when they do, it is the throw-er who can’t recognise them? …
OH…that’s a really cool interpretation–I love it when other people have better ideas about my poetry than I do. 🙂
I like ‘arriving waves’.
It may not “seem quite right,” because without the photo, it seems as though the ripples or the wave or the lake are throwing the stones, not the boy. I suppose it’s possible…
Yes, it’s always difficult to balance the desire not to weigh your haiku down with punctuation with the desire not to confuse the reader. 🙂 In this case perhaps I went too far in the former direction, I’m not sure.
In Harper’s Magazine they used to have (maybe still do, haven’t read it in a while) cryptic crosswords of the type that are ubiquitous in the UK, and the instruction they printed at the head of them was, if I remember correctly, “Mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution.” This is also often true of haiku. 🙂 Since the point of haiku is juxtaposition and connection, haiku poets often *want* their readers to have to think about what elements in the poem are really connected and what exactly is going on here. The ambiguity of no punctuation is frequently its point.
But then again, this could be just a pretentious-sounding way of avoiding responsibility for a big poetic fail. 🙂 Thanks for mentioning your confusion, it’s good to know when something is not working.
how about:
lake ripples
thrown stones
never return
???
so many ways to play!
Oh, yeah, I like that version, Angie, and much less confusing!