A recent CDHK episode called for experimental haiku in response to a specific image. Mine goes 5-4-5. Maybe 3 syllables are languishing on the other side of the fence.
« Imagination Without Limits at Carpe Diem Haiku Kai »
Bidirectional Barrier
Keep in or keep out?
Locked gates do both.
Is that what U want?
Hmmm. The face is a mask that nobody is wearing. Who could be contemplating? And yet …
There is no nothingness.
Quantum physics finds
tumult in vacuum behind
contemplative mask.
If the allusion in my haiku responding to
« Contemplation ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #103 »is too cryptic, I recommend A Universe from Nothing by L.M. Krauss.
While the form is conventional, the content of the haiku may be the farthest outside the box that I have gone. As of now, anyway. So the haiku is also a response to
« Carpe Diem Writing and Enjoying Haiku #6 new ways »
Not me. I am wistful. When color computer displays came in, I was jolted to see that a yellowish green (along with an orangish red) was now a “primary” color in RGB coordinates for colored pixels. I also had to use CMYK coordinates for colored inks and pray to the graphics gods that printing software would translate from RGB to CMYK in a way that respected how something looked. Eventually, I learned to put away childish things (like hard copy).
Before RGB
Red, yellow, and blue
were “primary” when kids
smeared paint on paper.
The ancient insight that «seemingly opposite … forces may actually be complementary … and interdependent» has modern echoes as diverse as wave/particle duality and concerns about work/life balance. The insight is profound but (like many insights) is sometimes pushed to absurd and pernicious extremes. I refuse to shrug off falsehood as the yin that complements the yang of truth. Likewise for evil and goodness.
Maybe the yin of solemn generality needs a little more of the yang of irreverent specificity.
Harmonious Completion of Necessary Cycle
|Balanced yin and yang.
|Spinning world will not wobble.
|Cosmic clothes washer.
My previous posts about waiting for autumn were not CDHK responses. My response to
Carpe Diem #1227 waiting for autumn
(Aki tikashi, Aki wo matsu)is to update and reblog them. They fit the prompt better than anything else I can offer now.
Soon after the wild daylilies have finished blooming, another flower in my yard turns to prophecy. The pale blue blossoms are long gone, but a few of the leaves on a few of the plants have another calling now. For about a day, they prophesy the next season.
Prophet for a Day
Wild geranium
(just one leaf for just one day)
turns in high summer.
As happens in many years where I live, late August of 2015 was a sneak preview of fall, the year’s best season:
Days are still too warm, but more are dry and breezy while fewer are hot and humid. A few cool nights lead to chilly mornings, and I suddenly notice that my garden flag with a picture of phlox is out-of-season. The roadsides have goldenrod and purple loosestrife now.
Virginia creeper is turning, as are some red maples in wet areas. Nearly all the healthy trees are still green, but there is a hint of yellow in many of those greens. The process will slow to a crawl in September; I will spend much of that month grumbling when the weather backslides and thinking “C’mon! C’mon!” when I look at green leaves.
October
Bright sun and cool air;
azure skies and pumpkin pies.
Leaves fall in glory.
Rules 1 and 2 of Carpe Diem’s
Writing and Enjoying Haiku #3 classical haikurequire a season-word and a cut, which is not the same as requiring exactly one of each. (Guess who has a math background.) Dunno how to write a haiku with interchangeable short lines (per Rule 6) that also flows naturally with exactly one cut, but I try to remember that there is a big difference between saying that I cannot do it now and saying that nobody can do it ever.
Hmmm. Suppose there is exactly one cut, that it is made by punctuation, and that moving the cut is allowed when interchanging the short lines. This permissive interpretation of Rule 6 did not occur to me until I saw Virginia Popescu’s beautiful haiga, where the haiku still flows naturally with exactly one cut, if we move the dash from after “stone” to after “sun” when interchanging the short lines. Her response to this episode is also a gentle reminder that my most dangerous assumptions are the ones I do not know I am making.
Maybe I can satisfy Rule 6 with a single stationary cut some time in the future. Maybe not. For now, I cut in both places where one line follows another.
This Haiku Is Kosher
No mosquitoes fly.
Basho’s frog just meditates.
The pond stays silent.
Not Quite Kosher
Zen frog bronze sculpture
(credit lost, like casting wax).
Dunno who to thank.
The images in this post are derived from
(where similar reds appear in very different places).
RevolverMaps Widget
Tiny raspberries
twinkle on revolving globe.
No seeds between teeth.
It is late afternoon, so I will get while the getting is good.
Do It Now
Low sun; long shadows.
Take photos before sunset:
twilight summons night.
Spider Rock — ©2012 John Wanserski for Creative Juice LLC
While there are many fine photos of Spider Rock and its shadow, this splendid one by John Wanserski has colors and composition that are distinctive and especially appropriate for my haiku. Click here to buy a print.
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Rules Went Away
!Doorknob meteor shower:
!mundane miracle.
Have U read Alice in Wonderland ? Expecting me to refrain from reworking an initial idea in my wordsmith’s forge is like expecting Alice to refrain from following a white rabbit who looks at a watch and frets about being late. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.
Rules Came Back
!Meteor shower
!seen by day in a doorknob:
!mundane miracle.
Tho originally written in response to a challenge on a blog other than CDHK, the tanka here can also respond to Carpe Diem #1214 dawn because it uses the word dawn and has fragment/phrase structure on 2 levels: between the haiku and the rest of the tanka as well as within the haiku itself.
My tanka responding to a challenge posted by Patrick Jennings is a riff on the splendid photo he provided, with hills that seem to go on forever in both time and space.
Originally posted by Patrick Jennings in
[Evanescent ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #89]:
Seize the Sunrise
Evanescent dawn.
Do hills endure forever?
No, but long enough.
~ ~ ~ ~
Art subverts time with pixels;
the moment also endures.
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 trilogy that began with 2 in the original version of a previous post.
Widower’s Song #3
Ghosts do not haunt me.
Remembered joys can often
overcome regrets.
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).
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.
Originally posted by Patrick Jennings in
[Evanescent ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #89]:
Seize the Sunrise
Evanescent dawn.
Do hills endure forever?
No, but long enough.
~ ~ ~ ~
Art subverts time with pixels;
the moment also endures.
