like an epipHany

is for Haiku

The haiku is a traditional Japanese verse form, in the original it consists of 17 syllables distributed over three lines of 5-7-5 counts.   It consists of colourful imagery drawn from nature, pairs two different images with a break at the end of the first/second line, marked by a word that often depicted season or time.  Rhyme is not necessary.

These rules have got fuzzier as the form has been adapted and adopted into English.  Variations exist, but the 5-7-5 format is mostly unchanged.  The season word, the “turn” at the second line may or may not be dropped. 

The haiku should feel like it has captured one transient moment in nature. Like a mini epiphany come to the reader, to be read in one single breath.


Here is the one I wrote for this challenge:

Cold hard nickel coin

tossed in the blue hat in hand -

the foggy dawn’s broke.

Posted for the A-Z Challenge.

Snow globe

Cold morning. Warm talk 

on telephone, the snow globe

of feelings stirred up.

Didn’t  think it would

shake up the flakes of feelings -

so dense the movement

flurries wiping out 

comical conical hats;

houses of red roofs.

White is peace and death,

the knees of trees deep in it

as it fills the woods.

What do we call this?

Moonpaper, crumpled

parchment leaves lie torn, alone

in the lotusdark

shattered peace so much

debris from a bomb blast and

no one to clean up.

The  Islamic Museum of Art in Cairo has been majorly damaged in a bomb blast targeting the Police HQ.  Collateral damage, I guess.  

Did you hear the haiku when they knocked?




Dreams.  Wistful marigold petals

strewn on the holy waters
of sleep.

Men at my door, their heels

are cracked with long journeys
over dusty days;

they wash at the tap outside,

as they clean up their feet emerge,
unscarred;

turn out just ordinary men

glad of a meal, and a place
to sleep.

Think nothing of it, I’m not

searching prophets
to solve all my puzzles;

they leave, rested; and later, there are

lotus marks leading
from my door.

When you wake in the morning

you can’t know what poems
the day shrugs off;

what marigold petal, which jasmine

or lotus shred falls
by your gate.

I looked for nailscars but got

lotusprints facing away
from my door.

They knew me for what I am.

Or maybe they’re men
with oddly scarred soles.

Facts can’t be changed by poems and

no rhymes intervene in their
cadence.

I heard no haikus on the breeze

when they knocked, I hear none still,
nothing

except blankness made into

the lilt of the still lake where
no-one walks

but I now have doorsills, mud

in lotus patterns till
the next rains come

as though I too am a pilgrim,

a torn petal on holy
waters.