Pilgrimage of poems: My body is a floating weed

Starting about a year ago, one of my friends invited me to participate in weekly poetic efforts on Facebook. First it was Haiku Wednesday—compose a three-line, 17-syllable poem in the format 5-7-5 and slap it up on your wall mid-week.

Considering their origins in the Japanese Zen tradition, they’re supposed to be focused on nature and the like. Mine are mostly about traffic, recruiters and other phenomena in the Valley they call Silicon. Well—I suppose they’re the natural environment here; because the unnatural has become the normal.

Then came Tanka Saturday—similar to Haiku, but Tanka (also known as “waka”) are 31 syllables and five lines: 5-7-5-7-7. Apparently waka were often used in the context of communication between lovers, but I didn’t know that when LQ ordered…uh, invited me to start writing them. So, again—I write about what I see around me, which is generally all the unremitting perfection that money can buy in a temperate climate.

Meaning—more traffic, recruiters, cookie-cutter entrepreneurs and the buzzwords everyone chatters to prove that they’re in strict conformity with the local notion of uniqueness. So—rockstars and ninjas and disruptors and all that ilk. And 90% male, whose photos are invariably shot in light blue long-sleeved shirts, no tie. Again, showing what raging innovators and outside-the-box thinkers (yes, that’s still a hot phrase) they are.

But okay, this isn’t about the nonsense that I write. It’s about people who know what they’re about with these poetic forms.

I believe this was the first haiku I ever saw; I would have been in high school. I remember wondering what a kiri tree is—if it was something botanically real, or some symbolic figment of Bashō’s imagery.

Won't you come and see

loneliness? Just one leaf

from the kiri tree.

It turns out there is a kiri tree:

Here’s one of his in the original transliteration, with several translations. Note that getting the sense of the poem in English sometimes results in violating the syllabic strictures:

Furu ike ya

kawazu tobikomu

mizu no oto

The old pond,

A frog jumps in:

Plop!

Alan Watts

The old pond —

a frog jumps in,

sound of water.

Robert Hass

dark old pond

:

a frog plunks in

Dick Bakken:

Listen! a frog

Jumping into the stillness

Of an ancient pond!

Dorothy Britton

Both men and women were noted for their haiku and tanka. I’ll give you a couple of examples from Ono no Komachi, one of the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals, writing about a traditionally tanka topic, love.

Thinking about him

I slept, only to have him

Appear before me

Had I known it was a dream,

I should never have wakened

So lonely am I

My body is a floating weed

Severed at the roots

Were there water to entice me,

I would follow it, I think.

Okay—two more, from Lady Ise, a contemporary of Komachi, and also one of the Thirty-six.

Because we suspected

the pillow would say "I know,"

we slept without it.

Nevertheless my name

is being bandied like dust.

And this one—well.

My body is like

A field wasted by winter.

If only

I, like the field burnt-over,

Awaited the return of spring.