"this beach of pebbles"

The poem below received a mention in the sixth edition of the SGP (Sharpening the Green Pencil Contest). It can be considered as a model of bouncing the ordinary life towards the area of allegory.

this beach of pebbles
after the wave
my life rearranged

Gregory PIKO
Yass, AUSTRALIA

I think the focus is on this – “this beach of pebbles”. This very beach I contemplate and recall now. This beach which reveals something unexpected and fascinating to me. This very beach which I propose to you as an object of admiration and meditation. The colloquial language knows how to say, elliptically and concisely, just what there is to say. It does not charge the text with details and descriptive adjectives. That is enough and also very expressive, it calls you over there, to see, to feel and to understand the situation.

The text continues as laconic as before, and, finally, skids more than suggestively, from what the wave really does - it draws the pebbles and leaves them in a new, different order - towards an effect that is entirely implausible – it (re)orders the author’s life (or the reader’s, if he also consents to this revelation). Through this simple substitution of the image of the relentless change of the pebbles’ ordering, moved away by the waves at the same time with human life, what we see is a teaching, and the text acquires the aesthetic value of a haiku.

Revelation, in the human sequence, is actually an assumption under the sway of an image that becomes a vision. There is no disorder, any change under the incessant assault of the waves of life is another unexpected and wondrous order. Thi wave is only the moment when someone has understood and has reconciled with his fate. The pebbles have long known this. And were always saying it, but in vain. The poem tells it to us without insisting, it gives us only food for thought. It draws our attention to the fact that it's already happened to someone.

(Comment by Corneliu Traian Atanasiu)

Comments on the Poems in Weekly Romanian Kukai no. 449

A few comments on the poems that were awarded prizes.

serving tea -
in the chipped cup
full moon

It is understandable that a custom is even more durable when the object used is older. A small chipped cup is preferred for its long-time fidelity and the stigma it wears from the harm it got while doing its job. The Japanese name for this uniformity and lack of symmetry combined with the mark of time is sabishia. After all, what is important is that, despite its chipping, the cup can reflect, as a wound, but equally faithfylly, the roundness of the moon.

a white butterfly
sitting on my chest -
I can barely breathe

No, this is not about a pressing weight. It is just the fear of not chasing him away. It is about mastering your emotion.


lullaby -
in the mother's rocking chair
a bouquet of poppies

Lullaby, a swing and a rocking chair. Are these not the same thing? Eloquent in their silence, the poppies sing a lullaby. Perhaps the same one as the mother does and that the son’s gesture recovers and pays it homage. The swinging is a kind of relief.


sun’s ascent -
bent towards the ground
the heavy spikes

    The tension is balanced. The spikes bend not just as a sign of homage to the sun but also as a sign that they cherish its gold.

scorching sun -
in the fountain’s bucket
the cool day

    The cool day and the scorching heat compensate for one another. And today they live in harmony.

orchards in flames -
everything started from
a ripe cherry

    The visual miracle proves to be one of the plants’ development. Of life that is not repressed.



fatigue -
on the floral dress
a live butterfly

We do not know if what is mentioned in the first part concerns the status of the artificial flowers, of the accidental fatigue of the butterfly or the temptation of the dress (for any observer that gives his philanderer’s attention).

deep water -
the whirl slowly absorbs
moonlight

    Allegorically speaking, the poem captures the meditation, the silent whirlwind of thoughts that slowly sip the moonlight and store it in deep inside the soul. The mirroring that steals from the depths.

only a brief respite -
over the scythes’ shine
grasshoppers’ jumps


The picture is wonderful. The respite of the workers unleashes the locusts. Which are there at the right place, just in front of the right mirror.

alone on the platform -
shaking off its flowers
a bitter cherry

What would loneliness be like without these almost reproving cues? The dismantled platform, the cherry tree in bloom with nobody to witness this, the bitterness of words.


a crippled man admiring
the arms of a tree -
it too has a stump!

    Empathy. Without discrimination and boundaries.

(Corneliu Traian Atanasiu)

Bitter coffee

bitter coffee –
all newspapers
only about war


Cezar Florin Ciobica



This time I propose you a poem which is very simple to decipher, to understand, to feel. The coffee is naturally bitter. Some prefer to drink it unsweetened, others fix it with some sugar. Coffee, even the bitter one, is a habit for those who have time to enjoy it on a leisurely morning browsing through the newspapers. Pairing the two is a symbol of comfort, of life without hardships, worries and troubles. Whether or not it is part of our usual routine, we know this experience at least from novels and movies. It is part of what Luis Buñuel ironically called the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.

The bitterness of the coffee is an agreeable one as long as the stories are more or less harmless. But when you mix the coffee only with news about the war, the habit is missed. The bitter coffee is no longer compensated by the sentimentality of the news. The bourgeois habit is undermined and compromised without anyone intending this, by the human pain and sorrow. And especially by a certain panic.

The words, as shown, are accompanied by an aura of connotations. And, the more their joining is brief, the more vibrant prove their centrifugal tendencies to evoke urgently the most varied contexts.

(Corneliu Traian Atanasiu)

The cuckoo and the grandfather clock

the grandfather clock has stopped -
through the open window
cuckoo’s song

Violeta Urdă



The cuckoo’s song, joined to the broken grandfather clock, is hiding a small ellipse: the cuckoo in the grandfather clock no longer announces the time, it is dead. The ticking time, measured in a pedantic way, is given, by the time of the cuckoo, another measure, a syncopated and living one. The antithesis between mechanical and living, between domestic and wild, between the stale air from inside and the fresh breeze from the outside imposes not only two images in opposition to each other but also an option, a vision of renewal, the an open window remaining a symbol of receptivity.


I think that the quiet grandfather clock, an adjective with two meanings, broken and silent, would have  been more suggestive, evoking a paradoxical sympathy of the pendulum. After all, even if the haiku’s text is silent as to a desirable attitude, it creates an atmosphere that is saturated by its suggestions.

(Corneliu Traian Atanasiu)

Apricot tree in bloom

apricot tree in bloom -
scraping the night off
the cast-iron cauldron


Cezar-Florin Ciobîcă

The poem excels in simplicity. Through its elegance of form, naturalness and ease of style, through its fluency. The fluency somehow deviates our attention away from the meaning. But as soon as we are a little more vigilant, we note that the gerund scraping introduces an equivocal action, without the certainty of a well-defined agent. Who is, in fact, the agent?

As we are more careful, we grasp the paradox: no scraping is going on, as we tend to believe, it is the night and not reinforced soot, the darkness, the clay that is scraped off the pot actually the night. The first elegance of the poem, which sent us on a casual but false trail, becomes now subtly provocative. Undoubtedly, we are being proposed a less orthodox agent – the blooming apricot tree. The whole poem swerves. Subtle images and objects – the apricot and the cast-iron cauldron  - are transfigured. For the characters in the fable, correspondences are searched in the visual imagination, in an attempt to cope with a vision. The blossoming, the coming of spring, the new light of the apricot flowers take us away from our obsession with the foggy cast-iron cauldron where we chew on the polenta of our everyday lives and which gives us a miracle, that of becoming open to the world. We get the whiteness of the dim eyes scraped; our eyes are dim with the pressing and important domestic chores.

If we have an additional agilility of imagination, we can finally see the grumpy cast-iron cauldron covered in a black foam, which is removed easily and elegantly by a Gillette Fusion Power razor with thousands of apricot blooms (functioning as blades).

Corneliu Traian Atanasiu

Thoughts on Haiku in Romania

“My interest in haiku was also favoured, perhaps, by the culture of the people to which I belong - a people with a culture which is very sensitive to influences, and able to synthesize and interpret in an original way the artistic models that came from the West or East.
Even the harsh and cold wind coming from the north is tempered on the Romanian soil by the mouth of the Danube and the Black Sea shore. In our folklore, it is nature that represents the frame of spiritual communion, in which man shares his sorrows and joys with the sun and moon, with the trees and flowers, with the rivers and mountains.
The doina was one of the Romanian lyrical genres that have cultivated man's relationship with nature, of course, on a different scale in poetic forms other than haiku.
There is this tradition of the dialogue between man and nature in our poetry; thus, the Romanians could not remain indifferent to the spirit to haiku, that cultivates a similar theme.
Someone might ask me whether the European aesthetic principles of mimesis, poesis, and catharsis do not come into conflict with the aesthetics of haiku or whether they do not oppose the reception of the haiku moment.
My personal artistic experience leads me to claim that these principles are not only far from having prevented me from getting close to haiku, but, on the contrary, they have helped me to open my horizons towards any form of poetry coming from another cultural space.
The taking over of haiku by non-Japanese poets in the twentieth century demonstrates that the spirit of this poem has transcended time, geographic spaces, as well as the boundaries and limits of the languages in which it is translated or created.
The Romanian language - although it has lexical features other than Japanese – offers me, however, plenty of possibilities of expression through its musicality, through the richness of the meaning of some words, to cultivate this poem and make it known in my country.”


ION CODRESCU, “A Way towards Haiku”
from the volume “Making the Tour of the Lake” – an Anthology by Ion Codrescu”, 1994, Constanţa

Haiku inspired by a photograph

A good photograph is not a reproduction of reality. It is not the raw product of a camera that simply records who enters and leaves the frame, for how long and what he does there. Behind the lens there is always a person who chooses what he wants to catch within the framework, who focuses and zooms the image or who prefers an hour of the day or a season, a certain atmosphere and color for the composition. If it is good, photography represents a point of view over what it captures, it is a vision illustrated through the visual elements carefully made valuable.
 

A haiku that written starting from a photo is not about only about listing slavishly what is shown in the image. The haiku poet sees beyond the image, which caused the photographer to capture and present it to others. If you can engage with that vision, then you can certainly write something that will not reproduce what you see in the picture, but instead you will use your words trying to weave a web of allusions that could meet a great atmosphere and color that vibrates in tune with the vision of the photographer.

(Corneliu Traian Atanasiu)

To one another...

Third Place
Haiku Contest Wild Plum 2016

black clouds rumble
our cotton candies stick
to one another

Lavana Kray



Both parts of the poem are linked to a strong expressive symbolism. Cut out from two antithetical situations, as their most relevant elements. Polarizing them in the most contrasting colors - black and white. Also, emphasizing the sharing of joy: to one another.

The threat and the secure oasis of happiness. The childlike joy that does not notice danger. Or, through the intensity of candor, it exorcises it. A haiku moment that can be placed on a medallion. Blessed is he wearing around his neck and soul such a talisman. He will always find serenity in the middle of the most hostile cloudy sky.

(Corneliu Traian Atanasiu)

frost on the branch

frost on the branch -

grandmother is spinning her thread

by the fireside

Letiția Iubu

A poem that seems a sample of cliche and of the commonplace. The two parts simply record the facts. Their ordinary reality is devoid of any thrill. There is not even a small textual accident (like a pun, a word with two meanings etc.) to deter from the literary sense of what was said. Where does, however, its unquestionable seduction come from?

First of all, from the atmosphere it creates. One of the two images, clearly antithetical, becomes harmonized. Nature is not hostile, it is knitting outside as naturally as grandmother does her spinning. Winter is just another season of the flow of time when the weather is sometimes smooth, sometimes stormy. Human concerns are consistent with it. And the result is a certain tranquility and peace of mind.

Secondly, grandmother and fireplace impel us to go back somewhere to an idealized, or idyllic, almost fairy tale past. Moreover, the quiet atmosphere is disturbed by a certain nostalgia for the times that are gone and are not coming back again. Were they for real? Have we really lived during those times? Does the new generation know the only from the memories of others? Even if we have not got to live during those times, we keep mourning after them as they are in contrast with our times which have since long ago decreed that "good weather" means only that we do not get wet, that there is no snow or mud on the road, that it does not keep us from going to work in time and back home as soon as possible, where double-glazed windows protect us.

       

That which, after all, turned out to be the significance of the poem is a kind of layered widening of the context, for which the two original images were just a pretext.

*

Even the photograph from which the poem began is only a pretext. The frost on the branch had to be doubled by a human image to create that atmosphere which leads us to regret the times when we could enjoy the frost without feeling gloomy about the impediments that it might have on the smooth running of the civilized world.

(Corneliu Traian Atanasiu)