HAIKU DIALOGUE – All the World’s a Stage – Break a Leg – commentary

All the World’s a Stage with Guest Editor Alex Fyffe

Welcome to our latest performance of Haiku Dialogue: All the World’s a Stage! Tonight’s program will begin shortly. Don’t forget to tell your favorite performers to break a leg! And let’s hope they don’t take you up on it – after all, tonight’s show is full of trap doors! That’s right: The inspiration for the next several weeks is once again going to come from theatrical terms. In the past, we’ve seen how terms like “intermission” and “curtain call” could inspire some bravura haiku, so we’re coming back on stage for an encore!

Below is Alex’s commentary for Break a Leg:

red sky at morning
all the shrimp boats held fast
by their moorings

Michael Henry Lee
Saint Augustine, Florida

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” Playing on this traditional saying, Lee crafts an excellent haiku, with ‘red sky at morning’ acting as the fragment that sets the scene for a well-drawn phrase about the shrimp boats that presumably will remain in place throughout the day, heeding the sky’s warning. The saying is easy to remember because of the rhyme involved, and Lee also captures that with the final word ‘moorings’ echoing ‘morning’ and anchoring the poem. This is just a finely crafted haiku that perfectly captures its subject.

afterwards
two magpies dance
on the broken fence

Guy Stephenson
County Donegal, Ireland

Of the several magpie poems submitted, I found Stephenson’s to be the most artful, allowing the joy of the dancing magpies to speak for itself without explicitly stating that symbolic meaning. I also appreciate the way the poem drops us into that moment by only suggesting some happy occasion that happened before. Whatever it was, this moment is ‘afterwards,’ and here we are, appreciating the feelings we see imitated in the magpies. The ‘broken fence’ seems an unusual choice here, but the contrast between the fence’s state of disrepair and the magpies’ symbolism and behavior I think adds to the poem overall, suggesting that even in a broken world, joy is possible in the moment.

to another year
of winging it
midnight wish

Zahra Mughis
Lahore, Pakistan

This poem resonated with me as a lifelong procrastinator. The speaker makes a last-second wish for the new year with no real resolutions for the future. I know many young people who simply do not make New Year’s resolutions, choosing rather to go with the flow, taking each day as it comes. If it were not for my wife placing a piece of paper in front of me and making me engage with the tradition of writing down resolutions, I’d probably just wing it, too. Let’s be honest – even when we write them down, we’re probably just going to wing it, anyway.

a rabbit
finding
its foot

Michelle Hoover
Castle Rock, Colorado

On the topic of luck, this one cleverly captures the good and the bad in one fell swoop! Here, we could understand the rabbit to be “finding its feet” or “finding its footing,” as in carefully making its way or gradually coming to stand and move. But the implication is that its foot has been cut off its own body, much like the “ing” from “footing” is cut short in the phrase. Some human is using the poor creature’s foot as a symbol of good luck, but as anyone who has ever come across another person using their severed foot for good luck knows, it’s probably not the most pleasant realization for the rabbit!

god of mischief
stealing all
Thor’s thunder

Terri French
Alabama, USA

Edith Hamilton helped make me a fan of Greek and Norse mythology back in my high school days, so I’m a bit of a sucker for a Norse allusion. French’s senryu captures the fun side of Loki’s prankster personality, perhaps literally stealing Thor’s thunderbolts, perhaps only metaphorically doing so, undercutting him as he is wont to do. This playful poem perfectly illustrates a simple but effective idea with a clever pun.

all the old stars
are still alive
here

Jerome Berglund
Minneapolis, Minnesota

Here. Right here and now, in this place and time, the light of long dead stars still shines in our eyes. And the films of long dead “stars” are at our fingertips right here on the screen in front of us. Chaplin plays with his food. Keaton’s stone face never changes. Monroe is a perpetual symbol. All of the ‘old stars / are still alive / here,’ shining in our eyes, as close to immortal as anything can be. I think of the stars we’ve lost in the past year – James Earl Jones, David Lynch, Quincy Jones, Maggie Smith. Long may their lights continue to shine.

bigger fish to fry
the restaurant server’s
distant gaze

Jackie Chou
USA

Another poem that’s clearly having fun with language, Chou’s haiku applies its idiom to a distracted restaurant employee, someone whose thoughts are miles away from the literal fish frying in the kitchen. Is she worried about paying rent or bills? Is she thinking about a fight she had with a partner? Whatever it is, something more important than this customer’s fish and chips is running round inside her head.

saree pinned
tight
holding it all in

Kavita Ratna
India

What really stands out here is the way Ratna uses the physical shape of the poem to illustrate her topic, with ‘tight’ squeezed in between lines one and three, resembling a distorted hourglass. The effort it takes for ‘holding it all in’ both sounds and looks strenuous. Perhaps the saree doesn’t fit as well as it used to, or perhaps social expectations force people into shapes which should not exist in nature. The double meaning of ‘holding it all in’ is of interest here, too, as perhaps the speaker is also forced to restrain herself from saying something impolite – holding in her feelings about having to hold in everything else!

prison visit
leaving behind
a stolen kiss

John Hawkhead
UK

Another clever use of language, Hawkhead sketches a surprisingly sweet image of a prison scene, as the speaker gets in a forbidden smooch to their lover before returning home. By concretizing the ‘stolen kiss’ as an item left behind, there is the added irony of the “thief” getting away after bringing a stolen item to their imprisoned sweetheart. Perhaps the suggestion is that the one behind bars was put there for theft. At the very least, it seems they stole the speaker’s heart!

under the bridge white lightning winos

simonj
UK

This poem conveys so much detail in so few words. ‘under the bridge’ not only sets the scene but also might allude to the idiom “it’s all water under the bridge,” meaning that something doesn’t matter anymore, or isn’t worth thinking about or worrying over any longer. The phrase ‘white lightning’ conjures the image of a bright flash of lightning against a dark sky while also acting as a slang term for moonshine, or homemade whiskey. And finally, ‘winos’ presents our characters, or at least some caricature we have in our minds of homeless people with a brown paper bag housing a bottle of cheap liquor. I see them huddled together under the bridge to get out of the stormy weather of the night, their pasts long behind them.

hit the books!
my daughter asks me
why I’m so aggressive

Ivan Georgiev
Germany

A generation gap poem. The sensitivity of the youth contrasted with the normalized sayings of their parents and their parents’ parents. “Hit the books!” really does seem like such a normal thing to say to someone like me, but teaching high school students, I often realize, too, that many of them are unfamiliar with idioms like this one and are sometimes shocked by things that don’t seem particularly offensive to those of us who have gotten on a bit in years. There are so many violent idioms like this one when you really stop to think about it. “Kill two birds with one stone.” “More than one way to skin a cat.” “Went in guns blazing.” “Give it a shot.” “Take a stab at it.” I suppose our language reflects the reality around us. But reality can change, and some idioms die, so perhaps a hundred years from now, no one will be hitting the books; maybe instead they’ll “upgrade their gray matter” (in the words of Deltron 3030).

another sunrise
the same white page
the same last straw

Bittor Duce Zubillaga
Basque Country

This is a powerful use of repetition to reinforce a feeling. There is a weariness at the heart of this haiku, how yet ‘another’ day leads to ‘the same’ thing and ‘the same’ thing over and over again. And yet, underlying this exhaustion, there is also determination to keep going, to keep seeing it through, an unspoken hope that this repetitive cycle might be broken eventually. One of my favorite aspects of this poem is the rhythm. The fragment has a traditional iambic pattern – aNOther SUNrise –, but the two lines in the phrase switch things up in a way that really brings home the heavy weight on the speaker’s shoulders, both having precisely four syllables in which the last three are all stressed – the SAME WHITE PAGE / the SAME LAST STRAW. These strings of stressed syllables force us to slow down as we read the lines, and they feel long and harsh to say. This is Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill, knowing that it will roll back down, but also knowing that he’ll try again.

our bowl of cherries
now a bowl of pits ––
regime change

Sheila Sondik
Bellingham, Washington

No matter how you feel about the current political climate, I think everyone has had a similar feeling at some time in their lives, that things once good are suddenly getting chewed up and spit out. The idiom of ‘bowl of cherries’ works so well here treated as a more traditional haiku subject – this is an everyday occurrence, something most of us have probably seen – but it becomes explicitly metaphorical thanks to the fragment that follows. The repetition of ‘bowl of [noun]’ emphasizes the change from full and ripe to picked over and bare, and ‘regime change’ drives home the speaker’s attitude about the incoming administration. This is a political haiku done right, with effective, evocative imagery and a gut punch ending.

Join us next week for our  next prompt…

Bios:

Guest Editor Alex Fyffe teaches high school English in the Houston area. His haiku and senryu have been published in various journals, including Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Failed Haiku, Akitsu Quarterly, and the Asahi Haikuist Network. Some of his favorite short form poets include Issa, whose work he discovered in the intermediate Japanese textbook he used while studying in Hikone, Japan, and Santoka, whose writing introduced him to the liberating concept of “freeform haiku.” Currently, Alex uses haiku in the classroom to ease students into poetry and build their confidence as readers and writers. Alex also posts haiku, including translations of contemporary Japanese haiku, on Twitter @AsurasHaiku.

Assistant Editor Lafcadio, a former teacher, now works from home writing, editing and proofreading study guides for nursing textbooks. She lives in Tennessee. She has written poetry for a long time but a couple of years ago fell in love with Japanese micropoetry and hasn’t looked back. Lafcadio has been published in a number of journals and anthologies. She writes under the nom de plume of Lafcadio because nom de plume is so fun to say. You can read her poems on Twitter (X) @lafcadiopoetry or BlueSky @lafcadiobsky.

Assistant Editor Vandana Parashar is an associate editor of haikuKATHA and one of the editors of Poetry Pea and #FemkuMag. Her debut e-chapbook, I Am, was published by Title IX Press (now Moth Orchid Press) in 2019 and her second chapbook Alone, I Am Not, was published by Velvet Dusk Publishing in April 2022.

Lori Zajkowski is the Post Manager for Haiku Dialogue. She lives in New York City and enjoys reading and writing haiku.

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

Portrait by Laurel Parry

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Photo Credit:

Banner photo credit:  “Interior of the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1874. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library.

Haiku Dialogue offers a triweekly prompt for practicing your haiku. Posts appear each Wednesday with a prompt or a selection of poems from a previous week.