While I knew that many rules about haiku are rules of thumb rather than definite requirements, I thought that poems in haiku form must have 3 lines. Then I wrote a 2-line haiku. While I was not the first to write a 2-line haiku, I may have been the first to write one prompted by a glance at a doorknob.
Category: serendipity
Machu Pichu Endures
The colors of glistening pineapple and watermelon may distract the eye from something unusual about how these chunks of fruit fell into a bowl. Let’s remove most of the color from the image and nudge a few other sliders in a photo editor. Does the accidental arrangement look somewhat familiar? Ever been to Machu Pichu?
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While I have only been to Machu Pichu vicariously, I have long admired the skills and can-do spirit of Inca stonemasons who made sturdy walls from precisely aligned stones of various shapes. Precise alignment is a lot harder with stone than with fruit.
The exquisitely crafted walls of Machu Pichu’s now-roofless buildings have endured centuries of frost heaves and neglect. What high purposes might the buildings have served? Were any of them schools or hospitals or research institutes?
Nope. The buildings were summer homes for the emperor and courtiers top 0.1% and temples think tanks for the priests pundits who told them that their wealth and privileges were rewards for pleasing the gods creating jobs. Machu Pichu endures in more ways than one.
Remember in November.
Image Sources for Machu Pichu
- Closeups of stonework have been cropped.
- © Giulio Mignani | 123RF Stock Photo
Aurora Serendipita
I glanced down one day and saw the Aurora Borealis (aka Northern Lights). Down? From aboard the International Space Station, orbiting the Earth? (I wish.) No, I just noticed yet another of the mundane miracles that console involuntary homebodies who are alert to them.
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I glanced up another day and saw the Aurora Borealis.
At my latitude. Indoors. By daylight.
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The shallow glass bowl of my birdbath was spending the winter as a decoration in the living room. While cleaning the room, I happened to set the bowl down under a window where sunlight could reflect from the bowl and then from the ceiling.
The Northern Lights came to mind when I glanced up at the reflections on the ceiling, and I later darkened the gray look of the dimly lit white ceiling to accentuate the effect.
The adjective [serendipitous] was coined long after people stopped speaking Latin routinely. I guess that either [serendipita] or [serendipitis] would work, if the Vatican ever wants to modify a feminine noun with a Latin version of [serendipitous] in a papal bull. I went with the one that sounds better and looks less like a spelling error.
Two Visual Illusions
Follow the photons. The backstory of one illusion begins far away and ends on a window pane. The backstory of another illusion turns day into night, but not in the same way as the challenge that inspired this post.
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A ghostly translucent squid seems to hover in midair between the viewer and nesting herons. No, I did not combine a heron image with a squid image in my photo editor.
The photo is of a page from National Wildlife magazine, taped to window glass and lit from the outside. (The page blocks a reflection of the sun from a neighbor’s window.) The squid looks a good deal closer than the herons despite being farther away, but only by the thickness of the page. The illusion in real life is just like the illusion in the photo.
The photo below illustrates a haiku about a bright full moon shining thru autumn leaves. Is it really the moon or just a flood light? Neither.
The photo was taken by daylight. The sun was above and behind me, but the light was dappled by unseen leaves (between me and the sun) before reaching the leaves I photographed. I was hoping for some chiaroscuro and got more than expected by sheer dumb luck. Most of the photographed leaves were in shade. Thanks to some unusually reflective green leaves that were in bright sun behind the colored ones, those colored leaves seem to be transmitting light from behind them when they are actually reflecting light from in front of them (and behind me).
The photos displayed above were chosen from among several exposure settings, then edited only by cropping. More extensive editing may be needed to create other illusions or to compensate for differences between how cameras and eyes see things. In particular, consider the challenge that inspired this post:
Illusions ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #213
Here are smaller versions of the images displayed in the challenge:
Desaturating a deliberately underexposed photo turned day into night. At any single exposure setting, a photo of the contrasty daylight scene would be either washed out in light areas or blacked out in dark areas. (Maybe both.) Editing merged several exposures to approximate how the scene looked to human eyes. Visit the challenge for more details on HDR editing and a fine haiku with no technical prerequisites.
Between Seasons in 2019
Where I live, 11-19 is usually too late for fall colors and too early for snowflakes. Recent past and near future met when Fortune smiled on an out-of-season CDHK challenge posted 2019-11-14.
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Carpe Diem #1781 The Quest For A New Masterpiece Continues … colorful autumn
Between Seasons #1
Lost autumn colors,
but garden flag remembers.
Snow on power lines.
The rules and examples for this challenge allow marking the cut with punctuation and tweaking the cut when swapping the initial and final lines. Let’s do that.
Between Seasons #2
Snow on power lines.
But garden flag remembers
lost autumn colors.
Time Warp in 2019
A little of the best from the past will come back in the near future, aided by the release of the second annual volume of “The Rabbit Hole” (an anthology of weird stories).
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For several years before and after 1960, I watched many episodes of the TV shows The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The best of them were imaginative and well-crafted, not just weird or scary. Some episodes had ironic twists or clever ways of conveying hints about how to cope with a nasty world. Some endure on YouTube.
Memories of those old shows resurfaced when I read some of the shorter stories in The Rabbit Hole, Volume 2. (Will wait until I have the ink-on-paper version of RH-2 before reading the whole thing.) The ambiance and a few details in two stories were strong triggers: … Puppet Theater … for The Twilight Zone and Carpaccio for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Various kinds of humor often appeared in those old shows, and RH-2 continues that tradition. The humor in RH-2 can be cynical (as in A Towering Tale), dark (as in The Service Call), or light (as in The Apple Cosmos and Entanglements). In old shows and new book, the humor is more than just giggles at pratfalls.
Click here to find out how to preorder RH-2 at a discount from Amazon. (For other retailers, click on the image below.) Don’t worry if U miss the discount. Both the e-book and the printed book will still be quite affordable after the release on 2019-10-01, and there are plenty of other things to worry about.
Serendipity in 2019: I got this post’s image for The Twilight Zone from the web page announcing the show’s revival with streaming technology. But I settled for a discontinued tee shirt design that approximates my vague memory of the logo for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Whatever works.
What Lovers Watch
The prose and poetry below respond to a CDHK challenge about love in summer. At 50 words in total (not counting boilerplate), they could have responded to an earlier challenge in the same series but were not ready in time. Can’t rush love (or barbecue).
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© Betty Shelton | 123RF Stock Photo
Lovers joined the crowd on the beach last night, watching fireworks shot from a barge. Now they watch the sunset.
© Dan Hahn
Sunset on the Next Day
The clouds burn yellow,
smolder red, and fade to gray.
The love keeps burning.
Rockets lit the sky last night;
more fireworks in bed tonight.
Seedless Raspberries?
The [Menu] button (atop the vertical black bar) reveals widgets like the Search box. Typing just the [Enter] key into the Search box is a way to browse WordPress blogs.
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.
Beyond Rules
While obeying many rules is common and often helpful, there are very few rules that must always be obeyed. I had thought that poems in haiku form must have 3 lines. Then I wrote a 2-line haiku.
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¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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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.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Rules Came Back
!Meteor shower
!seen by day in a doorknob:
!mundane miracle.
Lovers Watching a Sunset
A haiku that began as part of a comment on a post by Sieglinglungenlied gets a title and a life of its own. An outstanding sunset photo by Dan Hahn complements the haiku to form a haiga.
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This post’s haiku began as part of my comment on Sieglinglungenlied’s beautiful and creative post Partners, Flying through Clouds. I realized later that the haiku could live outside the comment with an appropriate title. (I like titles for haiku anyway.) Thank U, Sieglinglungenlied. Thanks are also owed to photographer Dan Hahn, with details at the end of this post.
Lovers Watching a Sunset
The clouds burn yellow,
smolder red, and fade to gray.
The love keeps burning.
Image Source
It would have been nice to illustrate the poetry with a series of 3 images that show the same clouds at successive stages of a sunset: yellow; red; gray. Even if I shoot such a series in the future, I would never be able to get a series that includes the lovers. So I did an image search, found many fine images of sunsets being watched by lovers, and found an outstanding one by Dan Hahn that showed all 3 color stages, in different clouds at the same moment. Bingo.
The image as used in this post has been cropped to emphasize the clouds; U can see the original in full glory by clicking on the link in item #1 below. Haiku lovers will also enjoy item #2, and there are other treasures on Dan Hahn’s website. Prints can be bought.
- Lovers at Sunset in the Cape Cod gallery
- Dawn Zen in the Seasons gallery
Serendipity with Squid
Did I superimpose 2 images to create a (clumsy) visual metaphor about the interconnectedness of life? Nope. The story begins millions of miles away. It ends on a window pane.
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Hmmm? A ghostly translucent squid seems to hover in midair between the viewer and nesting herons. No, I did not combine a heron image with a squid image in my photo editor.
The story begins millions of miles away, where the sun emits photons even more copiously than the pols emit factoids. Minutes later, a tiny fraction of the photons bounce off a neighbor’s window, pass thru my window, and hit me in the eye. There are many ways I would love to emulate people like Bach or Galileo; going blind is not one of them.
Yes, I could pull the drapes. But only a small portion of my window needs to be obscured. Would rather not waste winter sunshine. Yes, I could buy a window decal. Most of the decals I have seen are cutesy. The rest make a statement:
I am as ugly as a warthog with zits,
but the jerk who owns this dump
bought me as a decoration. Ha!
Of course, I am dissing only the decals I have seen, not any other decal U may have and like.
The Dec/Jan 2016 issue of National Wildlife magazine has photos from the annual NWF photo contest, including a photo of nesting herons by Mario Labado and a photo of a squid by Jackie Reid. I read the magazine on paper (yes, I am that old), and it so happens that the photos are on opposite sides of the same thin sheet, w/o much else to clutter what is seen when bright light passes thru. The fraction of duplex printed sheets that look at all good when both sides are seen at once is like the fraction of photons emitted by the sun that bounce off my neighbor’s window: tiny.
So I cut out the sheet and taped it to my window. The image of the squid is actually on the far side; the illusion of being closer than the herons is the same in my house as in my photo.
The composite image is indeed clumsy as a visual metaphor for the interconnectedness of life, but it does tone down the excess sunlight. It cost nothing beyond what I already spent to help support the NWF, and it looks better than a warthog with zits.
Mellow Curmudgeon 
