Today’s Haiku
Rocks fall from a cliff
A fly alights a dunghill
Details in a changing world
Fall is in the air. Only ravens wheel about the sky where last week the mocking bird chortled his panoply of songs. The walnut is baring its soul and the grape vine shines pure gold in the cool afternoon sun. In California one question looms large: will it rain? The long drought has frustrated our banana trees so they have forgotten how to put forth their fruit– a golden meal we have been treated to for the previous five years. We assume the drought is the fault of global warming which we were reminded of by a story in this morning’s L A Times. It seems that the Alaska island, Kivalina, is threatened with rising water, the result of global warming. GWE, (global warming effect) touches wherever we live.
Let’s talk about haikus. I have had the privilege of corresponding with Mrs. Abigail Friedman, author of "The Haiku Apprentice." During a two year stretch as a Foreign Service Officer in Japan, she managed to immerse herself in the study of haiku and the book is the result. For anyone interested in haiku, it is a must read. I go back to it often to try to steady my own work. Like many American writers of haiku I tend to be brash, I tend to like a strong statement with a strong pivotal last line that comes across whammo! As I see it, there is more delicacy in the Japanese approach to haiku.
This is a recent haiku from Mrs. Friedman which I liked:
end of summer –
in my son’s room
I try on his shoes
I liked it because, first, it amused me–a mother trying on her son’s shoes, then I wondered about her son, how old is he? how big are his shoes? where would she wear them? is she thinking of hiking? and so on.
Since war is much with us these days, I’d like to close with a war poem:
Memoriam
There are no medals, no monuments
For the first and last of any war
No posthumous praise to brighten
The endless days of death, only
The silent cadence of those who
Came after the first and before the last
To keep them company, and some small
Item in the newspaper with their name. *
Au revoir.
*From "Blue Flame ~ Selected Poems" by R. Dean Tribble