Search and Rescue — Haiku Diary June 2022
“Haiku is a personal history, and each one is composed to make a lifetime.” — Takaha Shugyo*
Walnut Creek, California
For the last year and a half, I have been writing haiku several times a week. I write at least half of them on my back porch, sipping my morning cup of green tea. I keep expecting to run out of things to say about the trees, hills and living creatures I can see from there, but it hasn’t happened yet. The incongruous palm fronds just peeking over the top of a mature oak reminded me of a kid who poses for a picture holding two fingers behind his friend’s head.
Mischievous fronds
Wiggle over the tall oak’s crown–
California palm.
This next haiku is about the Hebrew conversation group I go to twice a month. I grew up speaking Hebrew, although I am ambivalent about Israel and my identity as a Jewish person. But speaking the language brings old memories back to life, like those rare fire poppies that bloom after forest fires. So, I agreed to join, but only after everyone in the group promised never to bring up politics.
Circle of women
Speaking the language we lost
Shaded by old trees.
A friend asked me to pet-sit her goldfish, and to my surprise I became quite fond of the little creature.
It’s enough like love.
The way my goldfish flutters
When I pass her bowl.
On May 25, I woke to the news of the horrible school shooting in Uvalde. Nineteen children and two adults killed by a deranged teenager with an assault rifle. Trying Yearning to create some sense of normalcy on a day when it seems nothing will ever make sense again, I decide to go for a swim. At the pool, the person in the next lane complains that I am splashing her as I swim. She’s in a pool and expects everyone to make sure she stays dry? But it only makes things worse to direct snide remarks at her. I should have just moved over a few lanes. Today of all days, can’t we live in harmony?
There’s a small ornamental pond on my way home. I have driven past hundreds of times, but today, on an impulse, I stop to explore it. Under a birch tree decked with streamers of fresh green leaves I close my eyes, and let the sound of flowing water wash through me.
Midair liaison
Scarlet dragonflies couple
In the pond’s green light.
A few days later, I am in the Oakland Airport, beginning a trip to visit family in Kansas and North Carolina. A judge has just struck down the CDC’s mask mandate for interstate travel, so even though COVID cases are skyrocketing across the country, only a few people are wearing masks. As I wait for the call to board my flight, a young family strolls by — father, toddler, mother carrying an infant — all unmasked. Last summer, my friends’ infant grandson fell gravely ill with COVID. And now, overnight, taking reasonable precautions to stop the spread of a serious disease has become passé.
Unmasked travelers
Reveal more than their faces
By the airport gate.
Lawrence, Kansas
The first stop on my journey east is Lawrence, Kansas where my 88-year-old mother lives. That morning, I woke to a classic midwestern thunderstorm
Patiently, the earth
Endures mysterious rage
Summer thunderstorm.
I am exposed to fresh outpourings of anger every day, even if all I do is open my email. Maybe we are all in the middle of some kind of collective temper tantrum.
While in Lawrence, I continued the slow, difficult work of going through the old boxes of letters and mementoes that were put in storage when my mother moved out of her home almost ten years ago now. This time, it was a box of letters my great aunt and uncle had received in the 1930s and 40s. My aunt had left her home and family in Wisconsin to work in New York City, a level of independence that was very unusual for young women at that time. Her fiancé, my uncle, was signalman on a Navy destroyer. From the letters, I gathered that his enlistment and shocked his family. As a 30-year-old attorney, he could have either stayed at his safe desk job, or applied for an office job with the navy.
I read about a dozen letters, extracting them from their brittle envelopes, unfolding them for the first time in fifty years. They reported the day-to-day minutiae of theses long-ago lives; movies, birthday parties, minor illnesses, along with speculation about the war and when it was ever going to end. Little details affirming the connection between people living far from each other, in the days before long-distance phone calls, let alone emails and texts.
As I read, I began to sense the permission of these long-gone people, most of whom I had never met, to let go of these communiqués. I guess even they didn’t want their sniffles and quarrels to outlive them.
The gaping dumpster —
I surrender old letters
Freeing ancient ghosts.
Emerald Isle, North Carolina
From Kansas, I continued on to North Carolina for a beach vacation my sister and I had been planning since she visited me in California last summer. The Carolina beach is very different from the rocky frigid seashore of California. The ocean is warm and velvety, the sand is smooth and yielding.
Lost in the word ‘blue’,
A roiled ocean reflecting
Gradations of sky.
Being at the Carolina beach brought back so many memories. Although I hadn’t been there for over a decade, there was a time when my family vacationed here every year. The first time we came, my sister was pregnant with her son, Noah, who is now 31 years old. I was visiting from England where I was doing a postdoctoral fellowship. A year later, I would move to Boston, and for the next ten years, I would spend at least one weekend on the beach each year. My parents would be there too — my father, vigorous and healthy before his disabling stroke, my driven, opinionated mother taking a rare break from her myriad meetings and emails, my sister’s husband, a saxophone player who taught Noah to body surf and boogie board and shared a passion for windsurfing with my father.
Returning again —
Old dreams and ghosts mingling
Under a broad sky.
As the days went by, I found myself going back even further, reliving my own childhood memories of beach vacations.
Frolicking ocean
The ever-willing companion
of childhood summers
I am sky walking
On a thin film of water
Between sea and land
My father is dead, my mother incapacitated by dementia. My sister has been divorced for more than 15 years. Noah, the round little boy with a shy, sweet smile, has become a tall muscular man who builds trails for the Forest Service. And I am in my sixties, recently retired, starting to understand that there is less of life in front of me than behind me.
The receding tide–
Each wave giving up the shore
Just a bit sooner
One evening, my sister insisted on watching the January 6th Commission hearings on television. We hadn’t listened to the news all week and I didn’t want to puncture my temporary bubble of blissful ignorance. So I sat out on the porch instead, watching a storm roll by, trying my best to ignore the murmurings from the television.
Insurrection hearings–
Outside, the silent flashes
Of distant lightning.
Each morning I went for a barefoot walk along the beach. I was intrigued by the banks of clams, revealed for a moment, each time the waves swept away a layer of sand.
Low tide uncovers
This teeming metropolis
Of burrowing clams.
There are so many things we don’t know or see; some of them happening right beneath our feet.
Form or Freedom?
When I write, a phrase or a sentence about something I see comes to me and I build a haiku out from that. On our last morning on the beach, something struck me about the sight of our swimming suits, pegged to the clothes line. The three lines of this haiku all came to me at the same time.
Hung out to dry
Our empty swimming suits
Dance without us
It has been my practice to follow the traditional Japanese 17-syllable haiku form: 5 in the first line, 7 in the second, 5 in the last. Some poets are adamant that English haiku should follow these rules. Although there are gifted poets who argue with just as forcefully for a freer form, but I have always tried to be faithful to the 5–7–5 form. Since my haiku had only 14 syllables, I chewed on my pen until I could see a way to insert 3 more syllables.
Hung out on the line
Our empty swimming suits sway
Dancing without us.
I posted both haiku to a Facebook haiku group, asking my readers to tell me which poem they liked best. The post was much more popular than my posts usually are — I got 108 reactions and more than 40 comments. By a small margin, 16 to 14, my readers who expressed a preference chose the free-form haiku. There were also about 8 readers who said they liked both, and then a few who took it upon themselves to scramble my words into what they considered to be an improved version of the haiku.
After I got home, I revised the haiku again, sticking with 5–7–5 —
Last day on the beach
Our drying swimming suits sway
Dancing without us.
“Last day on the beach”, links the image of the swimming suits to the feeling of the end of a beach vacation. For a brief period, the place seemed to belong to us, and as we prepare to leave, we give up that illusion, leaving ‘our’ beach to the next set of vacationers. Given our ages and life’s uncertainties, who knows if we will ever return?
There’s a romantic notion that haiku should be completely spontaneous, like a Zen Master’s shout. But, in my experience, a frank response to a moment is only part of what makes a good haiku. Other ingredients are time, distance and patience. The Zen Master’s shout takes years of practice. And you don’t know what works and what doesn’t unless you have readers to tell you.
Hillsborough, North Carolina
I spent my last night in North Carolina at my sister’s house. We were tired after the long drive back from the beach. We unpacked, ate dinner, then settled on her screened-in porch, with a cup of herbal tea (me) and a glass of wine (my sister).
She lit the candle seated in an ornate wrought-iron mobile, that hung from a hook in the ceiling. A parent of one of her piano students had given it to her as barter for a semester of lessons. As night fell, a pattern of geometric shadows danced on the porch’s walls and floor.
On the porch at dusk
How the candle-cast shadows
Sharpen into stars.
My sister and I are very different, and we often misunderstand each other, but she’s also my oldest friend. It felt good to sit together in silence as the night came on.
Search and Rescue.
The next morning, my departure day, we got up early. Since it was going to be hot, my sister decided to take her dog for an early morning walk. We left through her back gate, stopping to chat with her neighbor. Without warning, his dog, a young, wiry pit-bull boxer mix, bounded off the porch and attacked my sister’s dog, a frail, aging beagle-ish rescue she’s had for 14 years. I spent the rest of the morning, accompanying them to urgent care appointments.
A piece of the dog’s ear was missing, and my sister was also injured — her own dog bit her hand as she tried to protect him from the attacker. Fortunately, they are both expected to recover completely, especially critical for my sister who makes her living teaching and playing the piano.
Still for days after my return, images of the brawl kept flashed before my eyes. I had to stop, breathe, and bring myself back into the present, remind myself it’s over and we’re all going to be okay.
I wasn’t sure how, or even if, I should write a haiku about this incident. Classical haiku are about the beauties of nature and usually include one of around 500 agreed-upon “season words”(kigo) such as ‘willow’, ‘cherry blossoms’ or ‘harvest moon’. ‘Pit bull’ is not on any list of haiku season words. That didn’t stop me from trying, but, despite numerous drafts, I could not write a satisfying haiku about a pit bull attack.
I was able to write about a dandelion though, a venerable and traditional haiku subject. I had written several dandelion haiku earlier in the year for a contest, and perhaps that prepared the ground for this poem’s emergence.
Certainties scattered
In just the space of a breath-
Dandelion puff.
I grieve, not only for my sister’s pain, but also for the way the shock of the attack now overshadows the precious week of beach time we spent together for the first time in so many years.
Collating these haiku is my search and rescue operation. I want to excavate these moments from the rubble, hoping that one day they will shine again.
Maybe I am also longing to send a message to the citizens of some more peaceful time in humanity’s future. If they exist, they will know all about the sickness, the violence, the looming ecological disasters of our era. But let them also know we had dragonflies and goldfish, that we counted haiku syllables, and how we walked by the ocean with the people we loved.
A world demolished
A thousand set in motion
Dandelion puff.
*The Earth Afloat: Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Haiku, Kato K. and Burleigh, D. eds.