Some of the haiku I send out are problem children: haiku I’ve drafted in the past but couldn’t make work somehow. And yet I carry those failed drafts with me, blocked in rectangles in my notebooks, just waiting for me to find the answer.
And that’s okay. Haiku has taught me patience, to wait for the poem to come in its own way, in its own time.
Last week, I mailed a postcard to a cancer patient undergoing chemo, their name suggested to me by their sister, hoping an unexpected bit of mail might cheer them.
Of course, I have my own history with cancer and chemo and surgery. When I mailed her haiku, a lot of feelings came up for me, feelings so powerful, I must have blocked the original events from my mind.
This prompted me to revisit one of my problem children, a haiku I had written about five years before, about the night before surgery, one whose solution was still out there somewhere.
But now it came quickly and without effort, as if it had been here all along. I’d like to think it had something to with the deep compassion I was feeling for a stranger I’d never met and who didn’t know me from Adam. That this connection, however tenuous, had reawakened in me the haiku moment I wanted to transmit.
night before surgery where is all my cleverness now?
Here’s hoping she is doing well and goes into remission soon.
Meanwhile, here are the week’s haiku, and where I sent them.
haiku 20220829 > Gosport, IN USA
morning coffee the same sparrow bouncing on her branch
haiku 20220830 > Oakland, CA USA
gopher ducking down his act of hiding catches my eye
haiku 20220831 > San Francisco, CA USA
night before surgery where is all my cleverness now?
haiku 20220901 > Vancouver, BC Canada
lakeside coffee
a solitary duck
unzips the morning
haiku 20220902 > Berkeley, CA USA
morning crows I enter my sixties washing the dishes
haiku 20220903 > El Cerrito, CA USA
rain after months I forgot how much this old coat leaks
haiku 20220904 > Brisbane, CA USA
three planets and half a moon I don't rush the dog
Well, that brings us into September. A month that brings us an equinox, what would have been my father’s 95th birthday, and for me, a new home: Grass Valley, California.
See you next week, folks. Meanwhile, I am out of here!