abducted fireflies (haiga7 for 19 Planets Art Blog)

haiga7 for haiga-a-day made with clip art on Microsoft Publisher

abducted fireflies
glowing in its eyes
frog

Another post for Rick Daddario’s haiga-a-day challenge at 19 Planets Art Blog, which I created from a clip art on Microsoft Publisher.

And what’s behind the image of the frog? This…

Noticing what could be unseen or merely imagined, magnifying the significance of what would be otherwise, some speck lost in the swarm of air particulates, this is what poetry, especially haiku, does to me. My mind cannot seem to work within limitations of space and time, or even sensations. What’s beyond a simple object in a single moment becomes a truth that breaks through thought barriers. Take the frog.

Basho has immortalized its break out of anonymity with his famous haiku, ‘old pond’. Reading it again and again, one steps into the monastic peace of an old pond until a frog that one hardly notices among stones, plops, and animates the peace with the sound of water. In a moment, the old pond turns into a universal moment of any moment that once was lifeless, suddenly, breathing from the unexpected.

My haiga is hardly a takeoff from Basho’s frog. It does not have the quietness of it, nor of the objective quality that identifies the poet as the observer but in whose mind, reality is arranged into three lines that total into a truth. While an observation as well, mine is less objective in that I state what I suppose in what I see, namely, the glow in a frog’s eye–seen especially in the dark. Knowing what it feeds on, I imagine fireflies and connect it with that glow. In reality, it is far-fetched as we know that anything creatures eat ends up far from the eyes, in the stomach. If a glow ever shows in the eye, it is that of satisfaction. But what I have done here, or think so, anyway, is tweak reality and made it slide into poetic thought, some other truth.

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morning tide/seashore/high tide (my last post at NaHaiWriMo for now)

a.*
morning tide—
still
the heaving waves

b.
seashore–
washed off burdens
lapping at our feet

c.
billows and clouds
fading as dreams—
high tide

NaHaiWriMo prompt: seaside, seashore 07/16/2011
*the only one I posted on the site

I’m taking a breather from writing haiku on the NaHaiWriMo FB site to rethink on where I am and where I’m going with this genre. My writing a haiku has been taking me longer and longer, more tedious because the more I’m learning about what makes a good one, the more conscious I am of each word I put down. I feel that this process is taking a toll on the intuitive way I write poetry as most of the lines I write do seemingly write themselves out in one breath. Not so, with haiku that I want to work; yes, it comes easy when I’m ‘haiku-ing’ for myself or in this blog but when I begin to be conscious of ‘judging eyes’, I falter and fail and I write what for me and often I’m not wrong, a ‘lame’ or ‘yikes’ haiku.

I guess I should try to learn more, read more from Basho who lured me into the art in 2005 when I found a collection of his haiku, honestly the first I ever read having been schooled in continental literature, at the Enoch Pratt Library main library in Baltimore. Perhaps, I should reflect more on how his haiku often turn out as a meditation like in the famous ‘old pond’ where the frog’s splash fractures the silence to remind him that in the stillness of a pond, there is sound, there is life that brings him back from the ether to the frog.

But not wanting to lose my haiku-writing cells, I’m still writing with the prompts privately and continuing with my haibun memoir, some of which or excerpts of which I’ll post here once in a while.

me to Shiki:/how far can i go/with haiku? (his possible answers)

heron at lake courtesy of wikicommons

me to Shiki:
how far can i go
with haiku?

his possible answers

heron equals
stillness

***

stillness–
we break the rules

***

nothing moves in the pond–
turtle

***

plum tree–
only when it blooms

***

only lotus flowers
in the pond

***

wind to bamboo:
how far
can whispers go?

deep in a pool (tanka though still not sure)

deep in a pool
a school of tadpoles wriggling
inveigles my thoughts
of a summer evening
to fall in love with a frog

It’s strange how thoughts take on an unintended form or lines simply write themselves out as if they simply ooze out of fingertips like this tanka-ish reflection. The image emerged from a ginko walk at the Chinese Buddhist Temple in Richmond we of the Vancouver Haiku Group had a month ago. The ‘pool’ is the bonsai pool but not tadpoles, instead a school of gold fish darted through moss covered stones. So why the frog? I had thought of Basho and the frog then out of nowhere or perhaps the stillness water always brings on in me as in that morning while gazing at the depth on the pool invited the frog to my lines…how strange and unexpected thought processes can be sometimes.