1.
closet space looking for something inside that isn’t there
2.
I step to the side as the sky comes crashing to the ground beside me.
3.
the cat yowls on the porch he can’t get off — sun moving across the sky
1.
closet space looking for something inside that isn’t there
2.
I step to the side as the sky comes crashing to the ground beside me.
3.
the cat yowls on the porch he can’t get off — sun moving across the sky
1.
spitting watermelon seeds the dark spits back
2.
the grasshopper rises so slowly — I think I must be dreaming
2.
the Buddha hides behind the fence where the chickens peck feed
looking at mushrooms and saying they are clouds
the sixth of August waiting for all this to detonate
those memories shadows burned into the pavement
*
Hiroshima Day is a summer kigo that is, obviously, very significant to the Japanese. As you’d expect, most haiku on this subject are quite somber and serious, and are much more likely to refer to history, politics, and social issues than your typical haiku.
I didn’t want to write something light and frivolous for Hiroshima Day, but I also didn’t want to write haiku that were specifically about the bombing — I wanted to write haiku that used images of nuclear bomb attacks to comment on more personal matters. It’s hard to know whether this approach is respectful of the suffering of the bombing victims or whether it’s cluelessly callous — after all, it was my country that dropped those bombs, albeit a generation before I was born.
I will say that I spent a large part of my later childhood and adolescent years, which coincided with the heightening of and then the end of the Cold War, very, very fearful of nuclear war, and so these images for me do have a personal significance that goes beyond the history of Hiroshima. I think there is an almost universal fear of nuclear war now in the human psyche, which has arisen from what we know of the horrors of those Japanese bombings. So it’s not really that I’m trying to appropriate someone else’s experience here for the purpose of making poetry, more that I’m trying to express what has become universal about that experience.
Man, sorry to be such a bummer on what is, here at least, a really beautiful summer day. I promise to have something more fun to read tomorrow …
1.
I can’t remember where I got this scar, or that one, or that one.
2.
streetlights switch on the child runs away from his mother
3.
Cassiopeia she refuses to stand next to her lover
*
Over at Troutswirl right now there is a great discussion about one-line haiku.
There are links to several other discussions of the subject, and several enlightening comments. Among other interesting points:
I keep finding more and more that if I am having a great deal of trouble with a ku, transforming it to one line frequently instantly solves my problem. This is when I say that the ku “wanted” to be one line.
Also, I think I am still treating American sentences and one-line haiku as more or less interchangeable, though they’re not, really. I mean, number 1 above seems clearly to be an American sentence to me; the other 2 one-line haiku. Must think more about this …
1.
waiting for someone to speak first the moon deflates
2.
ankle deep the conversation turns to drowning
3.
the sting of raspberry brambles ask me again