Recently, I went to an aquarium for the first time in years. During the dolphin show, I was surprised to see how thoroughly the trainers explained the dolphins’ genitalia and thought, this is probably the first sex ed class for half of the attendees (because they were mostly small children).
I then began to remember my own educational experiences during high school, which were of a completely different nature and put this playful poem together.
1
the dolphin show
anatomy introductions
after school
Since starting to write these haiku, I’ve mostly ignored ideas about how they can be written as one line, two lines, four lines, or even in more experimental concrete poetry type formats. Lately, though, I’ve written some poems that I think are interesting but that don’t work well with typical line breaks. This is one of them.
To me, it just works better as single words formatted vertically, as if falling down the page.
2
typhoon
rain
nothing
can
wash
this
away
Health has been a recurring issue in my poetry lately. I guess that’s a natural part of growing older.
Last week, a woman I work with said she would be taking a day off to attend a friend’s wedding, and I thought, you’re young enough that you still have friends getting married. Then I thought, I’ve reached the age where no one is getting married, they’re just passing away.
3
pretending
the doctor made
the wrong prognosis
I don't know if this poem works or not. It isn’t easy to write a successful poem a day, but I had an image that I wanted to capture. Without using I to clearly show a second person in the poem, it might be a little confusing, but I think that also gives it a surrealist type of playfulness.
4
stuck in traffic
a man on a bench
feeding pigeons
Often, haiku are supposed to have two or more images that interact in interesting ways. In some cases, though, each line works to build on the original image, developing it in ways that adjust its meaning and significance.
With this poem, I couldn’t decide whether to make the image of two old men be the first line or the last line. Making it the last line would have increased the surprise the poem imparts, but I think the image of two old men is the strongest and easiest to imagine so I decided to start there.
I once heard a person say that a poet should think about where he/she wants the reader to start a poem and where he/she wants to leave the reader at the end of a poem. With that in mind, I chose this order.
5
two old men
balancing umbrellas
on their hands
These seems like something that everyone has wondered at one point in time or another, or can at least relate to—on low days, after hard weeks, while raising your children and wondering how it is they’ve ended up on the path they’re on …
6
a crack in the mirror
or perhaps …
in me
I don’t follow rules very strictly, but I always keep them in the back of my mind and let them influence me. One traditional rule of haiku is including a seasonal word, a word that will allow everyone to recognize the approximate time of the year that a poem was written.
I don’t include these words in poems very often because when writing a poem a day, I find that seasonal words really limit the scope of what can be written about. That said, whenever I can, I want to make use of them.
After seeing a friend’s son for the first time in a while, I took a hard look around myself to find something seasonable and that would relate to the surprise I felt when realizing how much my this boy had grown.
7
persimmons
almost ripe, your voice is
deeper now
As always, thank you for reading.
