A haiku.
So, I wrote many and narrowed it down to only one, dangit! Here 'tis:
Purpose serve and gather
All sunlight’s lively treasures
Fall and make anew
This challenge has brought with it the digging out of one of my favorite scarce and rare books. No silly friends, I have not plagiarized, just used it for inspiration.
The book is entitled : "Japanese Haiku Two Hundred Twenty Examples Of Seventeen Syllable Poems" by. Buson, Issa, Shika, Sokan, Kikaku and others. It is translated by Peter Beilenson. Published: 1954/1955 by the Peter Pauper Press
I felt compelled to include an excerption from the Editors Note on Japanese Haiku:
The hokku--or more properly haiku--is a tiny verse-form in which Japanese poets have been working for hundreds of years. Originally it was the first part of the tanka (also a Native American word for Buffalo, which I learned from Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves), a five-lined poem often written by two people as a literary game: one writing three lines, the other, two lines capping them. But hokku, or three-lined starting verse, became popular as a separate form. As such it is properly called kaiku, and retains an incredible popularity among all classes of Japanese.
There are only seventeen syllables in the haiku, the first and third lines contain five, the second, seven. There is almost always in it the name of the season, or a key word giving the season by inference. (This is a short-cut, costing the poet only one or to syllables, whereby the reader can immediately comprehend the weather, the foliage, the bird and insect-life--and the emotions traditional to the season: factors which almost always are important in the poem.) But there is also, in a good haiku, more than a mere statement of feeling or a picture of nature: there is an implied identity between two seemingly different things.
The greatest of haiku-writers, and the poet who crystallized the style, was Basho (1644-1694). In his later years he was a student of Zen Buddhism, and his later poems, which are his best, express the rapturous awareness in that mystical philosophy of the identity of life in all its forms. With this awareness, Basho immersed himself in even the tiniest things, and with religious fervor and sure craftsmanship converted them into poetry. He was ardently loved by his followers, and by later poets, and his Zen philosophy has thus been perpetuated an later haiku. It is, indeed, a key to the completest appreciation of most haiku.
*The Editors Note goes on with one-paragraph explanations of some of the other poets included in the compilation, but the last paragraph is important, and here it is:*
One final word: the haiku is not expected to be always a complete or even clear statement. The reader is supposed to add to the words his own associations and imagery, and thus become a co-creator of hi sown pleasure in the poem. The publishers hope their readers may co-create such pleasures for themselves!
I'm seeing Sushi in my near-future......
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