Welcome to Soup’s Shabu Shabu. Sake is on the house, tonight. Be careful on overindulgence ;)
(You may stray off topic, but no sneaking poison fish into each other’s hotpots! Karaoke always welcome. What happens at the bar stays at the bar. Unless someone dances on the bar and then na na na na na, I’m telling-- and taking videos! )
I am not a great haiku poet. I am not even a good haiku poet. But I do love both reading and writing haiku. Writing haiku is not only about being in the moment, but also about seeing right into that moment. Maybe, the poet sees a parallel to what is happening or to what s/he is experiencing. Maybe, the poet has identified something significant, self-actualizing or even something humorous. Haiku is about emotion and thought, a kind of awakening or realization.
Some of you may be new to haiku or you were wrongly taught in school that haiku is a poem that is written in three lines with a syllable count of 5 in the first line, 7 in the second line and 5 in the third line.
Haiku can be written in one line, two lines, three lines or more. It can have less than 17 syllables (in fact most haiku currently being published is quite short.
Most haiku is written as two grammatically linked lines and one line which is not linked grammatically. This third line contrasts/juxtaposes the other two lines, but it may also add a nuance to the other two lines to give an aha moment.
Good haiku gives the reader a sense of time and place. In a tiny poem of 6 to 17 words, the reader can feel right there, experiencing that minutiae of life or nature.
As poets, we deceive ourselves that this is simple. But is it really?
Here are a few haiku I’ve chosen to share... I find them totally engrossing. BIG in their smallness.
Now, we are really only supposed to read one or two haiku a day.. and I’m sharing eight... so you may want to scan or just focus on one or two or if you want to gobble the bunch up, I wouldn’t blame you.
Tell me what you see. What do you like. Does one speak to you? Did you feel the aha moment?
(the following haiku are shared here for review and study purposes only and this blog will be deleted in a few weeks.)
unshelled pistachios
my father
on marriage
Tiffany Shaw-Diaz
burnt coffee
the taste of nothing
left to say
Glenn G. Coats
sunset –
the cow’s tail
conducting flies
By Hugh O’Donnell (Ireland
morning frost
she curls up
even smaller
By Anna Maris
empty beach
the rain fills
her prints
By Alexey Andreev
full moon
ghost crabs
race their shadows
By Jeff Hoagland
flock of white doves
lace the sky . . .
my grandmother's doilies
By Wendy Visser
aging ...
getting the freckles
i wanted in childhood
By Charlotte Digregorio