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Vintage Haiku by Ernest J. Berry

wedding day
she unlaces
her changing shape

 

into the silence between crashing waves a curlew

   

wet garden the puppy brings it in

 

desert heat        the kangaroo rat disappears into a snake

old garden shed
the insecticide can
full of spiders

 

nearly sunset we reel in a salmon redder than the sky     early to bed  a wild winter night in the downpipe

snowed in my frothy cappucino too hot to drink     in the flames our old love letters curled up together

nibbling on a leaf a yellow caterpillar lets in the sun

silent rain i stop to listen to the lake

ground fog
a cow looks up
occasionally

spring dawn pine needles dripping the night away

 

our wisteria flowering well next door

collective farm one of the scarecrows breaks her back

 

on her kimono
billowing in the moonlight
a heron in flight

 

late afternoon the porch icicle lit from within

keeping low sidling along to jenny craig’s

L.A.X.
a chilly wind stirs
her paper lei

 

empty garden  her camelias in full bloom

 

my nick name engraved on the trunk out if reach     pausing at the post she used to pee on

winter chill
a vivid sunset
colours the buds

xmas morning toys on his windowsill wrapped in sunrise

 

shaking hands with her feet new daughter

 

riverbed twisted to fit driftwood

desert moon.
crows on the joshua tree
going bronze

clifftop ........ti-tree .................windshaped

 

forest firemen huddle lighting up

 

eventide home a twisted hand tends the windowbox

night tide
the floating gill nets
fill with starlight

impressive name for a weed i look again

 

dawn service elderly soldiers dropping poppies

 

eulogy lengthening sighs in the cypress

moonlit frost
nothing stirs
the silence

taking off her face after a long day’s work avon lady

 

summer a little fish emerges from a cloud

 

---

HAIKU - the verbal cartoon
Ernest J Berry
Picton, New Zealand

 

One thing haiku didn’t do, is further my journalistic career. As a scribe I’d have been paid for words used, whereas now I treasure only unused words.

The shorter message is more easily and quickly digested. Whether it's appliance instructions, road signs, news items, jokes, prayers, cusses, proposals, poetry or senryu; short is sweet and haiku’s a verbal cartoon.

Conversely, I submit, your worship, that the soaring rhetoric of convoluted literary, political or legalistic circumlocution only contrives to anaesthetise consumers consciousness entirely obfuscating simplicity in fuzzy clouds of irrelevant verbosity.

Brevity’s thus economic and vital. Imagine for example 1st aid instructions so voluminous that the patient expires in line 1.

I like concision:

.................go

po...................................

.....Ernest J. Berry

mime
lifting
fog........................................

.....Jerry Kilbride

tundra .....................................................

.....Cor van den Heuval

wet garden
the puppy
brings it in................

.....Ernest J. Berry

wedding night
a satellite
winks.

.....Ernest J. Berry.................

hoar frost
barbed wire blossoms

- author unknown

 

chinese painter
deciding
on rain...................

.....ai li

titan i

      c

      e

 

Ernest J Berry

 

compare these [for example] to Southard’s famous:

The old rooster crows
Out of the mist come the rocks
And the twisted pine

This sumptuous 17-syllable saga replete with 4 definite articles is undeniably marvellous poetry but great haiku [to me] it is not.

Some of countless economic options could be:

cock crow
out of the mist come rocks
and twisted pine

rocks from mist
and twisted pine
... a rooster crows

first the rooster
then rocks and twisted pine
from the mist

.....etc etc etc

Since we are unable to recall more than a smidgin of all our verbal and written input, its vital that the essential image be unadorned and uncluttered. Of the myriad articles I've read, written & digested about haiku, all i can bring to mind at this moment are the following:

wildflowers
not one good enough
to pluck

.... Ernest J Berry

Of the myriad words I've read & heard about haiku, all I can recall at this moment are the following snippets [paraphrased]...

write at least one haiku per day.......John O'Conner

read read and re-read classic haiku...Harold G. Henderson

make haiku habitual........................Janice Bostok

live and look for haiku everywhere....Janice Bostok

wordless poem..............................Eric Amman

art of the unsaid............................anon

 

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