great drought
–
on the
bottom of the lake
not one bit
of sky
(Maria
Doina Leonte)
There is a certain apparent
simplicity to this haiku. However, it is as such only for
those readers already accustomed to
the haiku poems dealing with the mirroring in the water process. The special beauty of the poem comes from its doing this in a negative way, eliptically. On the bottom of the lake there is now only dry earth,
only dust. Mirroring, as a consequence, the drought. There is no drop
of water into which one single bit of the sky, of heaven, can be
reflected.
The gradation, which postpones
the meaning till the end, alternates the dryness (great
drought) with the deception
of humidity (lake, bit), to finally let
our eyes meet a reflection which is, in fact, prohibited. Only the last
syllable is the one that rounds
the meaning of the poem through an unexpected transfiguration: that which, until then, was just beginning to take shape, as a droplet (of
water) suddenly becomes a bit, a crumble, a glitter (of heaven)
which is, after all, absent. The dry bottom
of the lake has more
than dramatic consequences:
the hot sky above
us is no longer tamed by the cool,
fresh water. We only have left a
harmful radiation. Is it hostile or punishing?
Many of the best poems
flirt with what could
be considered a mistake of composition,
if we judge harshly. Apparently, they
go on the line of the least
resistance and they give the
impression of the continuity between
the two parts because, ah well,
following a prolonged drought is the the disappearance of water resources and the drying up of lakes.
It is, unquestionably, the false,
minimalist track, on which an ironic author sends us. If the last word were water, not sky,
then banality would triumph and the haiku
would be just the result of an abortion.
The
well-crafted work consists, after all, of the idea that substituting the water with the sky is not just an irony defiantly thrown at the reader, but
it represents a transfiguration of
the literal meaning of the poem, a
taking off of the images from the earthly common, everyday life, towards the sky which sets them free. Walking on the thread of
logical continuity, the final
finding is startling
and overturns all
that was previously painstakingly
built. If you were Lefter Popescu from Two Batches by Romanian writer I.L. Caragiale, you would easily
give in to the persecution
mania: Vice-versa! You may not, sir! It’s
too much! Vice versa! That's
quackery, you understand me!
(comment by Corneliu Traian
Atanasiu)
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