Weekly Romanian Kukai no. 440

First Place – Ana Drobot

bilingual dictionary –
besides the street’s name
cherry tree in bloom


Second Place – Grigore Chitul


ready to go -
some dandelion puff
hanging on to my suitcase

Third Place – Magda Vlad

four pins neatly arranged -
two pairs of butterflies
in an insectarium

Mention – Carmen Duvalma


homesickness -
in a yellowed envelope
the entire universe

Mention – Cezar Ciobîcă

visiting day -
through the iron bars
lilac perfume

Mention – Argentina Stanciu
pereți coșcoviți -
alb de floarea miresii
gardul văduvei

peeling walls -
white from the bride’s  flower
the widow’s  fence

Mention – Vasilica Grigoraş

lilac bouquet -
forgetting for a while
my longing for mother


Mention – Livia Ciupav

night watch -
no portent
in the coffee

Mention – Rodica P. Calotă

mosquito net -
the unstoppable entrance
of the blackbird’s song


Mention – Cezar Ciobîcă

Labor Day -
the blackbird’s song
without caesura

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)

Weekly Romanian Kukai no. 439

First Place – Petru-Ioan Gârda

lilac flowers –
the warmth is returning
in mother’s eyes


Second Place – Valeria Tamaș

weakened bridge -
even the butterflies
waiting for their turn to pass


Third Place – Vasilica Grigoraș

election year –
the venom therapy
more extensively used



Third Place – Valeria Tamaș

among the seedlings -
under the weight of years
mother’s hands


Mention – Magda Vlad


competition -
cherry flowers and stars
in a corner of heaven

Mention – Argentina Stanciu


Hawthorn flowers -
suddenly getting more quiet
the heartbeat

Mention – Ana Urma

almost daytime -
a branch with flowers
illuminating the window

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

Sharpening the Green Pencil Commendation 2016

This is all. How could you take your home with you? How could you take your orchard along with you as you are wandering away? Still, you never leave without taking anything away with you. As you leave everything behind, there is still something left for you to take along, it clings on to you, on to your coat's wrinkles, sleeves, pockets, to your brain, to the depths of your soul. And, on the first longer pause along the way, in the first oasis, the seats will sprout. Just like at home.

(Comment by 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)