Breathe !

The end of a month of Haiku-A-Day

Welcome back to the end of week four to returning readers and a 初めましてどうぞよろしく(pleased to meet you) to any new readers.

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Avoid covid, if you can.

This week was possibly the most difficult of all four due to my weird long covid breathing problems. Instead of the random, “elephant standing on my chest” feeling, it was nearly everyday. I now have a prescription that means the elephant is losing weight. And so I can begin to breathe again. Just in time for school.

I returned for two days work this week, two days of meetings, discussion and prep before we great the kids on Monday. Not much time for finishing off last weeks books, nor starting Richard Wright’s, Haiku. Which played into the first haiku of the week nicely.

On to the haiku

This week, as was the case last week, the haiku fell into a short, long, short arrangement and the average syllable count was up at 14. I thought I may have even unintentially written a 5-7-5 haiku, but it turns out I went even longer. I am not one to abide by syllable counting if I think it ruins the poetry and so one of the week’s selections, is heaven forbid, 18 syllables.

summer break done

all those jobs postponed

postponed again

This haiku sums up my break. Most of it spent on my back or sitting down. None of the jobs I wanted to get done even started. The haiku hinges around that doubling of postponed. Its repetition, the double plosive of the p, hopefully slowing down the reading but also mimicking some of the frustration felt by the poet.

slow, fat drops of rain

out of nowhere the thunder

then silence

Much of the week’s poems sprang from observation. None more so than this one. A thunder storm that struggled to get started. Those big drops of rain, then an explosion then nothing. Here I was working on the first line again to slow the reading down, to stretch out that experience of that rain that seems to come in fat drops, that you really wonder if it can be called rain at all. There’s a bit of intentional misdirection with the phrase out of nowhere, or perhaps its working for both the rain and the thunder.

regret

filled with memories

the empty chair

I got another book this week, This Overflowing Light, by the Japanese poet Rin Ishigaki. No haiku, but her poem Poverty, inspired the above haiku. When people are gone the difficult memories that we may associate with them hang around.

consulting room

she feels each death as if

it were her first

This was written for my wife. One of our cats has serious health issues and we got some bad news (or so we thought) early in the week. My wife does indeed experience every death as keenly as we did our cat of 18 years. We have had 7 cats die in 10 years.

summer creek crossing

I test each river rock

before I step

This poem was the result of a haiku prompt on Mastodon. The prompt was “creek” and immediately my mind went to one of the many dry river crossings I completed last year. I wanted to evoke a sense of trepidation in each step. I have a bad habit of rolling ankles especially when carrying a hiking pack ( the record is 7 rolls in one day, 5 on my right side). So half the poem is in monosyllables and there’s a proponderance of plosives ie t, hard c, k, p and b. I hope the haiku feels restricted.

arrested mid-fall

the white agapanthus petals

in the spider’s web

Another haiku developed through observation. The petals had fallen and been caught mid-tumble as if frozen in their fall, in the orb spiders web. This one got quite a bit of interest on Mastadon. Arrested was a deliberate choice. I was wanting to play around with misdirection again and I wanted to have a rather harsh connotation. Caught seemed too gentle. I could have gone with frozen and their would have been some nice alliteration in the first line. Arrested though seems to work well and there’s some subtle alliteration with arrested/agapanthus and white/web.

overnight rain

everything in it’s deepest

hue

We had a persistent, light rain all night and as a result everything seems saturated with its deepest colour. As I type this I wonder if

overnight rain

everything satuarated in its

deepest hue

might not be better. The misdirection around saturated seems to work well.

Summary and final thoughts

I was definitely more concious of word choice and the effect of letter sounds this week. The poems seemed to come a bit easier but then I don’t think I was pushing as hard as last week. My favourites are arrested mid-fall, and summer break done.

I seem to be fairly comfortable in the phrase + fragment approach and the average length seems to hover from 12-14. I took time to breathe both physically and metaphorically this week and the work was easier for it. Fingers crossed for next week.

P.S. I bought a wordpress subscritption/domain and hopefully my Magpie Song website won’t be serving you and ads.

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You can also follow the daily Haiku postings at my website Magpie Song, or wait for the summary here. You may also follow me on Mastodon @sbwright@mas.to