Select Haiku from the Members of the World Haiku Club
Susumu Takiguchi
Oxford, England

 

harvested fields I carry an empty cup back to the house kirsty karkow

I have long noticed a fascinating charm about this poet, which is fast becoming a rare commodity - something rustic, something uncontaminated, something natural or even innocent.

Last month, I was travelling in northern Japan, enjoying the mountains and countryside which had one third turned into autumnal gold and red. Among many things on which I feasted my eyes, I could not help being pleasantly surprised that wherever I went there was no eyesore of modern monstrosities such as ugly factories with their ugly chimneys, ad boards, discarded fridges, cheap-looking bridges, ugly housing estates and car parks. All of these are ubiquitous across Japan, south of where I was on my journey.

It was not so much that in these areas nature was preserved, as nature and man lived in complete harmony. "Wabi" or "sabi" came to my mind in addition to lots of other terms describing the essence of what I was seeing. However, among these terms I wish to choose "rustic beauty", which could also be used to describe the poetry of this author and her haiku, which is my choice for the November Issue.

If the haiku is based on facts, then "I" would be the author herself. One could guess that she might be somehow involved in farming, most notably a farmer’s wife, or a member of a farming family. Of course, she could be just visiting a farm, or motoring and coming to stop at a farmland. Or, she might be, like myself, a towner turned country folk.

Whatever or whoever the author may be, the haiku is imbued with the eternal and universal feeling of autumn, countryside and its rustic, uncontaminated beauty, as well as with something immediate, ordinary, personal, specific and human. That is not all.

We soon realise that since she is carrying a single cup, she must be all alone (living in England, could I be excused to assume it is a teacup?). What on earth was she doing - drinking tea all on her own in the middle, or at the edge of fields where harvest had already been done? Or, was she merely taking a country walk and coming across an abandoned cup by chance? Very intriguing. What house is she returning to? Are there any other people in the house? Does she do this everyday? My curiosity is certainly aroused.

Then, the word "empty". Yes, the cup is empty but the fields are also empty of crops. The house may also be empty (at least, empty of her). Suddenly, everything seems to be empty. Panic, panic! What about her heart? What about her life? What about life itself?

Despite the seeming tranquillity of the haiku on the first impression, there is so much to take in there. What an irony! The haiku depicts an empty cup, or bare fields, or an empty house and yet it evokes all sorts of emotions and thoughts which cannot normally be contained in three lines.

Technically, Karkow’s haiku makes some popular do’s and don’ts look somewhat less than dependable. The use of the first person singular "I" in the second line, for example, is superb. It is such a relief to see it used well like this when all too often we are force-fed with all these contorted haiku where "I" is artificially suppressed! Also, this haiku may risk being labelled as a sentence. Not so. The first line sets the scene very successfully, not only in terms of image or landscape but also of the atmosphere, theatre of a play to be performed. The second and the third lines constitute a sentence if placed in the same line, but here comes the beauty of Western poetic tradition - a line break. By putting "back to the house" in a new line, the intricate and subtle pause (in perfect length) thus created prevents the haiku from having such demerits as are supposed to be found in "sentence-haiku" -- such as haiku turning into prose, thereby saying everything, leaving the reader with nothing to add or imagine.

Besides, "back to the house" comes something like a surprise. The first two lines do not really tell us what is happening: "What has the empty cup got to do with the harvested fields?", "Where is this person carrying the cup?" or "Why has she got the cup in the first place, or what importance does the cup assume?" All these questions seem to be cleared like the lifting of fog when we read the third line.

I have termed the essence of this haiku "rustic beauty". The following is another example written by Karkow and posted to WHCbeginners this last July.

push-ups the intermittent tickle of summer grass

 

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