Morning Haiku and Waka – November 28, 2015

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carpet of leaves

morning walk
silence in the city
dawn breaks

each morning bleaker
carpets of leaves
skeleton trees

dawn visions
ravens on the wind
the beech stands nude

in the sky
another bird rumbles –
the plane for Venice

white cat mews
locked out of the house
cold in the courtyard

returning home
my poetry awaits me
embracing life

warming the water
a hot cup of green tea
no sugar needed

© G.s.k. ‘15

This week’s heeding haiku with Chèvrefeuille November 25th 2015,”baransu” on Mindlovesmisery’s Menagerie is very interesting indeed.  Here Chèvrefeuille does a break down and explanation of how to create balance in a haiku … here are the haiku he used as examples:

a walk through the city
step by step I discover
a newly built world

© Chèvrefeuille

the old pond
a frog jumps into it
sound of water

© Basho (Tr. Chèvrefeuille)

the old pond
yesterday … Irises bloomed
only a faint purple

© Chèvrefeuille

mountain stream
salmon swims to the well in thin air
rebirth of summer

© Chèvrefeuille

25 thoughts on “Morning Haiku and Waka – November 28, 2015”

  2. Wonderful in its balance between the bleak and the peaceful. I found myself thinking first of where the world seems to be at (although it is not really any more or less the way it always has been) and then how we can find within it a refuge of serenity, without looking away from what it is outside the windows. We need both: to walk in the “city” and to retreat (not in the sense of running away) to our “home”.

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    • Thanks for your comment … life is at once bleak and bright, in order to have shadow, one must of course have light. As you say the world has forever been the way it is now – Caliphs called for Jihads and Popes called for Crusades … of course as our population grows and the planet shrinks, thanks to our technology, we are made more aware of human failure and horror. But the light never ceased to shine and beauty never ceased to exist nor will it now. The individual must not think that the shadows are life .. it is for us to grow, to learn and teach serenity if possible … we must refuse to think that the shadows the Caliphs and the Popes create is our be all in life.

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    • Ah … you like my leaves! 🙂 I must have taken around 10 photos of the leaves … kept kicking them up and trying to get some in the air … but my camera just wasn’t up to the task 😦

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  4. I love your words, always painted so thoughtfully. I don’t suppose however that I’ll ever fully immerse myself in what Haiku is “supposed” to be–I must guard against giving up writing them entirely.

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    • Well .. now that would be a shame … I think that people give too much importance to the “what’s supposed to be” – you write lovely verse and I enjoy your haiku very much … did you know that you can write about everyday life and about funny things in haiku form … they’re called senryu … I think today I will write some senryu, just for fun.

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        • That’s about the right attitude as far as I’m concerned … the importance of any poem is to get across an idea in a synthetic form .. it’s about writing to the heart. Haiku can do that but it goes through the head first.

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          • I think I got caught up in our discussion, where you said you would “torture” your haiku until it fit the “read backwards as well as forward” structure. At first it amused me, but then I seemed to take it so seriously that I was wrangling with mine–I so need to just chill out already 🙂 Good grief, Charlie Brown!!

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          • well structure is important to haiku … but I’ve seen haiku poets who ignore structure when they want to. I certainly didn’t intend for you to get obsessive about that, sorry, my bad. But I still torture my haiku, basically because I like that aspect, that idea of reading them forwards and backwards … but if the need arises, I don’t flog them too much and let them come out as they will. 😉

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          • To me it’s fun too … kind of like a puzzle, reading it in the two directions, sometimes the haiku takes on different meanings.

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          • Yes, a puzzle 🙂 I remember how our discussion began: I had commented that one of yours was “sad”–there was a seagull involved, I believe. And then you told me about writing it so it could be read both ways. Upon reading it “the other way”, it wasn’t sad anymore 🙂

            And another “supposed to” I read, has something to do with the first half of the words form a complete sentence, and then the remaining ones are the 2nd complete sentence…something like that. I just threw up my hands–if I have to think that hard, then haiku simply isn’t my game 🙂

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          • Hmmm .. I don’t know this rule .. or maybe I do, but I never let it bother me. Sometimes non of my phrases create a complete sentence … sometimes it can happen at the end … One thing you’ll notice is that people love to write rules … but rules in my opinion are guidelines .. when I began to prompt I came across some of the great Western poets who wrote their poetry, sometimes in quatrains sometimes using iamb pentameters … and then popping up with something completely unrelated to what they were “supposed” to be doing. I figured at that point that if Frost, Dickinson or whoever could do that then I could.

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          • See that’s the way I view poetry too–guidelines, which the classic poets didn’t always adhere to, but were probably “known for” (as taught in my high school English classes). If I see the “complete sentence” bit again, I may draw your attention to the blog, so you can read for yourself 🙂

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in shadows light - walking under weeping pines - spring rain

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