Analyze That Haiku # 1

There’s a new prompt on Carpe Diem Haiku Kai and as you can tell from the title it’s about analyzing haiku and telling the story behind it.

The goal of this new feature is to tell the story you read from a haiku given. It’s said that haiku isn’t easy to compose, but it’s even more difficult to read haiku. If you would ask your readers to tell you what they think you experienced while writing the haiku … they will tell you (almost certain) another story than you had in mind while you wrote, composed your haiku.

Very true indeed…the concentration of a haiku may or may not tell you what the author was thinking when he or she wrote the poem.  So here’s the first prompt, which I’m going to try to understand…at least from my experience.  It is a haiku written by Chèvrefeuille back in 2011 for Haiku Heights:

in the old barn
behind the hay bales

a secret meeting
© Chèvrefeuille (2011)

Credits: Old Barn

Walking upon an autumn day,
I came upon a shabby old barn.
The hay – harvested and baled,
Was stacked hither and thither
Inside the old building …
Among the bales I came upon
Two young conspirators who’d come to spy
A litter of kittens
Hidden in the old  byre
With a bottle of milk at hand.

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I admit it…no one talks about kittens, but outside of the obvious lovers that might be meeting in a barn in the hay, I remembered how long ago I used to like to spy out birds and small animals with a friend of mine in a woods near my home

The poem gave me a warm feeling of harmony with autumn … the days are still warm, the fields are golden stubble …  the bales are not out in the fields anymore, so it’s around october … the farmers putting the hay away create walls and sometimes mazes of hay inside the barns where discrete meetings, whether by young explorers or young lovers, becomes very easy.