Haiku Poems

Page Menu: Click the links in the table below to go to each poem.

Prologue	Haiku 1 Anger Filled Your Face	Haiku 2 You Choreograph
Haiku 3 He Said He Loved Her	Haiku 4 Until You Return	Haiku 5 Splashes of Color
Haiku 6 The Cat's Yellow Eyes	Haiku 7 Geckos Stare Stiffly	Haiku 8 Swallow My Anger
Haiku 9 Over My Shoulder	Haiku 10 Tongue Searching Your Mouth	Haiku 11 In Your Eyes New Thoughts
Haiku 12 The Cusp of Summer	Haiku 13 Angled Sunset Rays	Haiku 14 Candle Aroma
Haiku 15 A Shovel Resting	Haiku 16 Some Have Touched Our Lives	Haiku 17 Shoemakers, Masons
Haiku 18 Masons Patiently	Haiku 19 Golden Globed Grapes	Haiku 20 Father’s Silent Voice
Haiku 21 Frog Sings at Sunrise

Prologue

In the mid nineteen eighties on a steamy humid Hong Kong evening, I walked the streets of Wanchai where the streets are brocaded with neon signs, reaching out to the streets like luminous fingers. My Chinese friend guided me as we walked up several flights of a dark elevator-less apartment building. My friend’s friend was a traditional Chinese artist living in a tiny apartment in which every inch of floor and table space was generously overwhelmed and populated with canvases and paper and paints and brushes.

The artist painted with a variety of brushes with an extraordinary breadth and range of sizes. He painted on large sheets of hard white paper, using solely black paint. The artist was intense and not speaking a common language, the artist and I smiled and spoke with the animated use of our hands and arms, as my friend facilitated and translated our conversation to and from Cantonese and English. Lying about the claustrophobic room and in every available flat surface, and hanging from walls were literally hundreds upon hundreds of sheets of paper with the economical use of brush strokes depicting animals, people, landscapes, and seascapes and the people and places of the world.

The artist encouraged us to play a game in which my friend and I would randomly and verbally depict a scene with a staccato list of concepts and things ---sunset, trees, beach, a standing man, a boat, a wharf, a woman in repose-- whatever. With precise deftness he would dip various brushes in his single bottle of ebony paint and with astounding immediacy the picture would appear in a matter of seconds. So much white paper! So little brushed paint! So few seconds to accomplish the task! So much depicted! And there before us in real time, out words were transformed into a painting with unfettered speed and economy of brush strokes. He captured reality with great economy and profound insight into the essence of the reality. So few lines! So much white paper! Yet our imaginations saw the shape and harmony and texture of the unpainted white. He used the unpainted white of the paper as a musician uses the silence between the notes of music.

The seventeen syllables of a haiku are revealed in three lines of five, seven and five syllables. The economy of words and the immensity of what is revealed are comparable to the black ink paintings of the Hong Kong painter in the tiny room. What is not said in the haiku is the white paper of the painting. There must be some balance that goes beyond science or rigorous revelation. What is said, so simply and abstractly, makes the haiku come alive and stir the emotions. What is not said, but suggested actually completes the poem, and in fact involves reader to participate in the poem. A haiku has no meaning until it is read. The reader becomes a participant in the poem.

The Japanese have been writing haiku for hundreds of years. Great haiku and their writers are admired and discussed and contemplated. Ancient and revered haiku are as admired and loved with as much reverence as when first stroked on ancient paper centuries ago. It is rather out of fashion to still use the 5-7-5 syllable structure and often modern tastes do not adhere to that discipline, but it is still a challenge to be caught up in the old tradition. Any attempt at the 5-7-5 ancient format should still be respected and its merit assessed on the “black ink of it” and the “white paper of it.”