5 January 2020 (winter deepens)

Another response to a kigo (season word) prompt, this time to “winter deepens”:

winter deepens

the dark allure

of open water

4 January 2020 (clear and cold)

Inspired by the winter kigo prompt “clear and cold”:

clear and cold

following the crows’ calls

to an owl

September 3: Shorebirds

Weskeag salt marsh in late summer: hum of crickets, rich sunlight, silvery flocks of shorebirds sifting through the salt pannes as the tide ebbs. The piercing cries of the sandpipers and plovers this time of year are so bittersweet, speaking to us of summer's end and imminent loss. The transience of things, and yet the cycle of life--gone too soon, but back in the spring.

Traditional Japanese poetry often referenced the plover (plover is "chidori" in Japanese--a word that must be onomatopoetic, sounding as it does like the bird's piping call). Yet in almanacs of Japanese season words, or "kigo," the plover is a winter word, as in this poem by Ki no Tsurayuki (translated by Kenneth Rexroth):

When,
Heart overwhelmed with love,
I hurried through the winter night
To the home of my beloved,
The wind on the river was so cold
The plovers cried out in pain.

Those were not the plovers we saw and heard today on the marsh, where the sun warmed the yellowing reeds and mummichugs churned in algae-clouded pools. Today's plovers embodied, for us, a longing for summer to last just a few more weeks.

Stirred by shorebirds' piping cries,
we face fall's chill
together.

June 9: Cuckoo

My co-worker Joe, who spends most of his time these days working at the Land Trust's Beech Hill Preserve, reported that he heard two cuckoos calling while he was on the hill today. The cuckoo is traditionally found on season-lists of words (kigo in Japanese) used in haiku that are associated with summer. Hototogisu, the Lesser Cuckoo, was used so often throughout many centuries of Japanese poetry that it became a cliche, standard poetic shorthand to indicate summer.

Here's an 8th century cuckoo poem by Otomo no Yakamochi, from "A Haiku Menagerie" by Stephen Addiss, in which the use of the cuckoo resonates beyond that of poetic device:

In the summer mountains

on the leafy treetops

the cuckoo sings--

and echoing back from afar

comes his distant voice.

And a lovely haiku by Ryota, written a thousand years later (causing me to pause in awe as I consider the tremendous history and tradition of poetry in Japan):

The cuckoo

with a single call

has established summer.

On Beech Hill cuckoos aren't heard often enough to become a cliche. Perhaps the ones Joe heard today were trying to tell him something: time's passing and summer's almost here. The passing of time and the ephemerality of life are often the Zen-like essence of haiku. And one thing we understand here in Maine is the brevity of summer.

Draw one more poem

about cuckoos and summer

from that deep old well.