HAIKU DIALOGUE – A Walk on the Wild Side – Photo 1

A Walk on the Wild Side: Relating to the animal world – with guest editor Carole MacRury

Issa showed compassion to animals in many of his haiku, such as “butterfly flitting– / I too am made / of dust” and “spring breeze– / monkey families, too / take healing baths” (by Kobayashi Issa, translated by David G. Lanoue). Basho also noticed and related to animals in many haiku. Many of the masters were lay monks or wrote haiku through the Buddhist belief that animals are sentient beings.
We encounter many creatures in our day to day life, through our pets, walks in the wild, aquariums and zoos to name a few. We share similar drives, to reproduce, to raise young, to protect them, to find food and seek shelter. Social skills, love, and even play are also shared attributes.
I will post four photos and with each one, please take the time to note your reaction, any emotions, any memories or thoughts that crop up. What is the body language of the animal saying to you? It may be you write a haiku about the animal, or it could be you write about something that relates to your life simply by interpreting the animal’s body language, gaze, or action towards something happening in your own life.

next week’s theme: Photo 2 – Angry Bird

We know birds age, as we age, but somehow I had never encountered what I would consider an ‘old’ bird, until this eagle. Take a good look. It has reached its natural life span and is probably 20 to 25 years old. Its eye was rheumy and faded, its beak worn down and ragged. Its feathers were askew. It was being bothered by a gull who sensed the eagle’s weakness. He turned on it briefly, then flew off in a lumbering fashion. This eagle collapsed and died 2 days later. Of old age. We all get old, we die, some through natural causes, some before their time. Write a haiku in response to how this old eagle makes you feel, either for the eagle, or for your own inevitable aging. Can you relate?

The deadline is midnight Pacific Standard Time, Saturday January 16, 2021.

Please submit one or two original unpublished haiku inspired by the week’s theme by clicking here: Contact Form.  Please put Haiku Dialogue in the Subject box, & include your name as you would like it to appear, & your place of residence, with your poem.

A few haiku will be selected for commentary each week.

Please note that by submitting, you agree that your work may appear in the column – neither acknowledgment nor acceptance emails will be sent. All communication about the poems that are posted in the column will be added as blog comments.

below is Carole’s commentary for Photo 1 – Zoo Life:

My humble thanks to all of you for submitting your haiku and sharing your personal connections and associations as inspired by this image. Many of the haiku and senryu expressed empathy for animals forced to live a caged life. Other poems reflected upon a variety of human frustrations, moods and insights felt through our own newly experienced loss of freedoms through Covid. My choices reflect haiku and senryu that could stand alone and not rely on the image. I hope you enjoy these five poems that kept coming back to me. I would like to have chosen more. Please find your own favorites in the long list and leave a comment for the poets. We all learn from each other’s insights. Notice I do not attempt to label any poem haiku or senryu. I leave that up to others.

zoo enclosure –
the scent of sadness
fills the air

Nick T
UK

I’ve always appreciated the phrase/fragment aspect of haiku. In this case, the fragment provides a setting for an unforgettable and thought-provoking phrase, ‘the scent of sadness’. I appreciate the sibilance and the sensory impact of this phrase, along with the invitation to reflect upon how sadness smells. We know we can smell fear, why not sadness then? It’s the smell of the ocean within our own salty tears, the smell of depression, the smell of an empty room where a loved one once slept. But this haiku speaks to the smell of a caged life, to fur, wet concrete, waste and browning food, to an animal life behind bars. The smell of sadness permeates the air, permeates me in an unforgettable way.

lockdown
now I understand
their rattling of cages

Tracy Davidson
Warwickshire, UK

I appreciate the sense of epiphany in this haiku as expressed through the last two lines. The sudden understanding of what it feels like to be in ‘lockdown’, be it a zoo cage, a prison, a cage holding asylum seekers, or even our own sense of lockdown as experienced through Covid restrictions. I am also reminded of the many people who feel locked into their own bodies through an incapacitating illness. This haiku packs a powerful emotional punch through understatement that allows the reader to sense the frustration, anger or despair one would feel under any circumstance of enforced confinement. Lockdown is the perfect word choice as it opens the haiku up to multiple layers and interpretations depending upon the reader’s own experiences. This is a haiku that can stand the test of time.

blue hour
pulling the sheet
up over my head

Terri L. French

This haiku needs little explanation. You either feel it or you don’t. I not only felt it, I could relate to it. It all starts with the open ended ‘blue hour’. Well, there is an actual blue hour, but it’s more a phenomena than an hour and can be seen just before dawn when the sky has a bluish cast. Although it happens before dusk too, the phrase suggests the morning. But on a metaphorical basis, haven’t we all had our ‘blue hours’, blue itself suggestive of a sense of melancholy not to mention the blues as expressed through the musical roots of Black-American spirituals. While the thread to the image is slender, it is visceral in the way it resonated with the ennui of a caged animal and the ennui we might feel when it comes to facing another day under confined circumstances.

cabin fever
in my quarantine dream
I’m Rilke’s panther

Susan Rogers
Los Angeles CA

It’s not uncommon for Japanese poets to allude to famous poems in their haiku, so I would encourage those who are unfamiliar with Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “The Panther”, to look it up. You won’t be sorry and it will deepen this haiku even more and add insight into the emotional connection the poet must have felt with this image. The poem, however, stands perfectly well as it is. ‘cabin fever’, and ‘quarantine’ both relate strongly to the sense of confinement of ourselves and the cat. Most of us are familiar with the relentless back and forth pacing of caged animals. It mimics our own sense of restlessness under Covid restrictions. There seems no escape even in a dream, from the sense of confinement, either for the panther or the dreamer. One senses the feverishness of both.

family reunion
the way we treat
distant cousins

Bryan Rickert

The honesty of this haiku hits home, both as it relates to our own treatment of distant cousins and the ape family who share 97 percent of our DNA. Without the image, it’s unlikely that the reader would think of our connection to the great apes. The haiku stands alone without need of the image and I appreciate where the poet’s mind went with the prompt. Family reunions bring together people who are related through blood but come from different branches of the family tree. This haiku brings to mind the family tree as it relates to humans, but also, knowing of the image, the sense of guilt in the way we treat a species we are closely related to. Again, while the haiku stands alone without need of the image, this would be a perfect example of the rules of haiga, where a fully realized haiku paired with the proper image could, together, offer a third element of appreciation. But for me, I will never attend a family reunion again without thinking of this haiku.

below are the rest of the selections:

shadow boxing the yardarm

Helen Buckingham

 

isolation
the neighbor’s argument
with his dog

Deborah Karl-Brandt

 

how sadly
the caged eyes
watch the fly

Subir Ningthouja

 

winter night
a homeless man wrapped
in layers of newspapers

Olivier Schopfer, Switzerland

 

monkey’s paw–
my love letter too
finds a home

Arvinder Kaur,Chandigarh,India

 

zoo–
chimpanzees chaff
masked visitors

Teiichi Suzuki, Japan

 

marital strife
the gloom
in mother’s eyes

Helga Stania

 

lattice window
with every passing bird
a bit of freedom

Mirela Brăilean
România

 

world view of goldfish
inside the glass bowl
outside the glass bowl

Vishnu Kapoor

 

how easy to see
deep down in the dog’s eyes —
years of misery

Mark Meyer

 

this urge to fly
a drifting cloud
over the zoo

mRehm UK

 

litterbug —
a scrap of paper
jolting our conscience

Ingrid Baluchi (North Macedonia)

 

a caged chimpanzee plugs its ears …
visitors noise

Daniela Misso
San Gemini (TR)
Italy

 

zoo visit . . .
flies cloud
the yawning lion

Aparna Pathak

 

zoo visit
behind the bars
you and me

Eva Limbach

 

anxious being our planet

Roberta Beach Jacobson
Indianola, IA,. USA

 

the onset
of another bad-hair day . . .
lockdown

Valentina Ranaldi-Adams
Fairlawn, Ohio USA

 

a chimpanzee
yawns
through the bar

Mohammad Azim Khan Pakistan

 

quarantine
my zoo
life

Pere Risteski

 

ZOO generation
the shade of the rainforest
only in dreams

Dubravka Šćukanec
Zagreb, Croatia

 

wolf howl—
the primordial echo
of my cockapoo

Clifford Rames
Freehold, NJ

 

from the window
an inmate sees
komorebi

Surashree Joshi
Pune, India

 

zoo –
every dream
imprisoned

zoo –
ogni sogno
imprigionato

Maria Teresa Piras

 

childhood memory
dentist office ashtray made from
a gorilla’s hand

Gary Evans

 

school children
aping the inhabitants…
monkey house

Michele L. Harvey

 

morning fog
the house cat stalks sparrows
on the fifth floor porch

John S Green
Bellingham, WA

 

wrinkled papers
in the chimp’s cage
a child’s lost crane

Barrie Levine
Wenham, Massachusetts

 

Wild Kingdom
flies on the paws
of a white tiger

Tim Cremin
Andover, Massachusetts

 

under the weight
of boredom
a summer yawn

Melanie Vance

 

deep silence
over the zoo
Orion

cezar-florin Ciobîcă

 

pandemic
in the animal farm
a new rebellion

kaiser von kahn

 

every parrot talking…
the zookeeper’s
blank face

Pat Davis, NH USA

 

zoo visit
who will blink first
the monkey or I

Minal Sarosh
Ahmedabad, India

 

at the zoo
the child watches
the pigeons

Helen Ogden

Guest Editor Carole MacRury resides in Point Roberts, Washington, a unique peninsula and border town that inspires her work. Her poems have won awards and been published worldwide, and her photographs have been featured on the covers of numerous poetry journals and anthologies. Her practice of contemplative photography along with an appreciation of haiku aesthetics helps deepen her awareness of the world around her. Both image and written word open her to the interconnectedness of all things; to surprise, mystery and a sense of wonder. She is the author of In the Company of Crows: Haiku and Tanka Between the Tides (Black Cat Press, 2008, 2nd Printing, 2018) and The Tang of Nasturtiums, an award-winning e-chapbook (Snapshot Press 2012).

Lori Zajkowski is the Post Manager for Haiku Dialogue. A novice haiku poet, she lives in New York City.

Managing Editor Katherine Munro lives in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and publishes under the name kjmunro. She is Membership Secretary for Haiku Canada, and her debut poetry collection is contractions (Red Moon Press, 2019). Find her at: kjmunro1560.wordpress.com.

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