Seen in Spring
Kelly green moss on
rocks near the clear quiet stream
with water striders
Heralds in the Sky
Flying clouds reveal
unseen wind above limp sails.
The crew dares to hope.
My haiku in response to Ghosts ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #92 is third in a series that began with 2 in a previous post.
Widower’s Song #3
Ghosts do not haunt me.
Remembered joys can often
overcome regrets.
For sailors on the open sea in the past, to be becalmed was always a hardship and sometimes a disaster, as described in Goethe’s poem Meerestille (or Calm Sea). I got the image and English translation dislayed in this post from a website celebrating German Romantic literature. U can read another English translation of Goethe’s poem here.
My tanka expresses yesterday’s fears in today’s language.
Becalmed in Olden Times
Viking longships moved
with oars pulled by aching arms.
Oarless ships stood still.
Oarless crews waited for wind,
while food and water ran low.
As the photo and poem in the challenge so aptly illustrate, to be becalmed can be a pleasant experience nowadays. Admire the crescent moon and furl the sails. Start the engine and head for home. Be confident of getting there.
My tanka expresses yesterday’s fears in today’s language, lest we forget how high we have climbed and how far we could fall, in technology if not in poetry.
Like the conflict between living in the moment and planning for the future, abstract/concrete (or general/specific) is a conflict that can only be managed, not avoided or resolved. Trying to be 100% one or the other does not work. We must muddle thru, preferably with awareness that what works for one person at one time will not work for all people at all times. This post muddles thru the abstract/concrete conflict with a mostly abstract tanka inspired by excerpts from the mostly concrete poetry in 2 posts by others.
Consider the first of 4 stanzas posted in {underground (20170523)}:
© Crow
i have learned the hard way
that just because something
has been buried does not mean
it’s dead
It could stand alone as a fine short poem. It also inspired the fourth of 7 short stanzas posted (along with an interesting biographical sketch of the 17-th century painter Caravaggio) in {Caravaggio Dreams}:
© Poet Rummager
Do you not see what I’ve buried deep,
has dug itself out to find me?
Maybe it’s because of my math background that I felt these excerpts were more powerful standing alone than in their original contexts, with concrete details about zombie cannibals and Norse gods (Crow) and a dream encounter with Caravaggio (Poet Rummager). While I do prefer cremation to internment and do appreciate Caravaggio’s pioneering of expressive chiaroscuro, I found all those details distracting. I was moved by the quoted stanzas despite what went with them.
One of the virtues of haiku poetry is that there is scant room for anything irrelevant, so I tried putting my takeaway into a haiku. But I found that format a little too restrictive. What happened after whatever was buried deep had dug itself out? My haiku left open the possibility that it might have just toddled happily away, w/o the ominous implications of the first line from Crow’s stanza and the last 3 words from Poet Rummager’s stanza. Wanting my poetry to be forthrightly ominous rather than ambiguous, I extended the abstract haiku to a tanka with (as it happens) concrete imagery in the 2 added lines.
Empty Grave
I buried something
that was not already dead.
It dug itself out.
~ ~ ~ ~
It shook like a wet dog and
followed my scent to find me.
Tho a uniform level of abstraction might be nice, I can live with the muddle. At least in visual art, the distinction between abstract and concrete is somewhat muddled anyway (and not just because of photography).
Yes, short words are better. But not always. It depends on what U want to do. Here is a little silliness with self-reference in response to [Diminutive ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #90], which displays a good use of a long word.
Wanting Five
Ah, “diminutive”!
Big word for “tiny” fills out
first line of haiku.
Hmmm. Would anybody want a long synonym for “tiny” in a 5-7-5 haiku? Nah.
BTW, self-reference in language really is a big deal, as explained (among other places) here and here. It has also been joked about in other haiku. Some examples are here and here.
