back to school -
only the old man in the swing
counting syllables
Corneliu Traian Atanasiu
Counting Syllables
When you deviate a little from the path you usually walk on, you can notice
new things. Or rather, you are no longer on autopilot mode and you pay more
attention to the new route. So today, after passing by some newly arranged
playgrounds, preferred by parents and children and quite lively, taking another
alley, a rather dusty one, there appeared in front of me, sitting on a bench,
only a man abstracted from his thoughts. Children, absolutely none.
I didn't look at the man anymore because the idea
came to me. The lone man in a children's playground symbolized its deserting
very well. The fact that the school has started and the students have other
concerns. Higher-level ones. I could also look for any concern for the man, in
contrast with the playing for which the space was arranged. Maybe a beggar
eating his frugal breakfast gathered from the trash. Maybe someone who was
already taking a nap reading the news from a months-old newspaper, but recently
received in the mail by the wind that had brought it to his bench right now. He
didn't have a door. No house either.
So I took on a first verse that says, elliptically,
only that school has started (and the children don't have that much time to
play anymore):
back to school -
thus suggesting that the playground is no longer
frequented. Now I had to find an interesting concern for the only beneficiary
of the playground. I thought that a beggar, a homeless man on the street, was
not very busy with his studies and might not be a perfect reader, maybe he
doesn't really read much, he and he can barely spell. It would have been
something that brought him strangely closer to the students already in the
classrooms. The newspaper was giving him work to do. And, not being an obligation,
it seemed like a pleasant exercise. However, in this way, the playground also
became an outdoor training space. Didn't the peripateticists do the same in the
past, walking through the garden of Akademos?
on a bench a beggar
doing his spelling
The poem was already growing complex. Education is
done at any age, with children in their school years, with those who abandoned
it by recycling in parks. Looking closer, I saw that the bench was still too
small to suggest a playground. A swing would have been better. And, after all,
if it was still about pedagogy without borders, I said that it is better not to
abuse such frequent mentioning of beggars usually met in haiku poems. Perhaps
an old man would have been more desirable and more in antithesis to the child.
I also relied on one that would mark the exclusivity (only he was there) and
the inadequate presence of the old man in a place for those of other ages. And,
because the old man should be wise and, obviously, knowledgeable, I thought of
replacing the syllabification with the well-known habit of the one who is still
trying to start writing a haiku:
only the old man in the swing
counting syllables
Now the approaches were more numerous and included
not only the allusion to perpetual training but also to the acquisition of a
certain learning habit.
back to school -
only the old man in the swing
counting syllables
And the swing updated not only its allusion to the
playground but also the more subtle sense of origin, the miraculous place of
another beginning whenever possible. By the way, any haiku author will taste
it. Well-versed or just a novice. Especially since the counting of syllables is
one of the most compromising habits for authors who should care more about the
essence of the poem than its form. And the first verse, as the poem progressed,
also slipped slightly from leaving the playground to perpetual school.
(Comment by Corneliu Traian Atanasiu)
