HAIKU DIALOGUE – All the World’s a Stage – Trap Door – 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 Trap Door:

storm cellar—
a child lowers herself
into thunder

C.X. Turner
UK

Turner’s closing line is a poetic manipulation that feels effortless but is difficult to pull off effectively. The fragment, ‘storm cellar–,’ prepares us for the verbal twist that happens in the phrase, the sound of thunder becoming a solid space into which the child moves. The sound indicates both the physical space – the storm must be right upon the family as they seek shelter – and the child’s emotional state – shaken by the thunder that has so suddenly threatened their safety. Storm cellars allow us to dive into the earth and ask it to protect us from the elements above, but there is a suggestion of burial in this act, too: death and rebirth – either back into our old, familiar world, if we’re lucky, or back into an utterly transformed one, if we’re not. The odds are enough to shake anyone.

scene change
rising through the trap door
spring birdsong

Elizabeth Shack
Illinois, USA

This one pairs nicely with the last – a change of scenery from the booming thunder of a serious storm to the gentle murmur of songbirds rising up onto the stage of spring! In the final line, we anticipate something visual, only to unexpectedly find ourselves surrounded by sound. If life is a stage, as Shakespeare would have it, then the transition from winter to spring is nothing but a ‘scene change’ – oh, but what a difference it makes!

birdsong outside
the boardroom
how thin this glass pane

Ravi Kiran
India

Barriers may be thin and transparent, but that realization doesn’t necessarily change anything about the fact that they are still barriers. It seems like it would be so easy to step outside, away from this boring boardroom, out into the world where birds are singing, lighthearted and free. But that thin layer separating our workaday lives from musical freedom is still there, almost more cruel for showing us what we’re missing out on, where we could be as opposed to where we have to be. It is no coincidence that the homonyms ‘board’ (bored) and ‘pane’ (pain) show up in this poem. Sometimes when we’re forced to endure boring meetings, it hurts the heart a little to imagine something better.

escape hatch I slink back into yesterdays

Rashmi VeSa
Bengaluru, India

We all can use a bit of escapism every now and then. Whether it’s getting lost in a fantasy book or the latest science fiction TV series, we all go through the ‘escape hatch’ to get away from the stresses of life for a little while. The speaker of this poem ‘slink[s] back into yesterdays,’ finding comfort in the things of the past, memories of the beforetimes, when they were younger, maybe when they felt more optimistic and full of energy and potential. The use of ‘slink’ makes it seem like something the speaker is not entirely proud of – they have to steal away into the past, secretly slipping back into those memories, maybe wishing that things had turned out a little differently – or, at the very least, taking a secret pleasure in imagining the ways they could have been.

phantom portals—
children vanish into air
at chore o’clock

Vidya Premkumar
India

‘chore o’clock’ makes this a standout. Children (and adults, not infrequently) have a way of quietly slipping away when there’s work to be done, suddenly nowhere to be found. Sometimes people just want four o’clock to be like any other hour, chore-free. It’s hard to blame them. Still, I wonder where they go to get away from their parents? What ‘phantom’ zone do they discover to avoid the dishes? Where do these ‘portals’ carry them off to when it’s time to pick up their rooms? Wherever it is, it must feel like Neverland in comparison to whatever’s going down at ‘chore o’clock’….

trap door
the way back to neverland
no longer there

Stephen A. Peters
Bellingham, Washington

Speaking of which, when did the portal to Neverland disappear? When did chores and routine replace our fantasy worlds? And can we rediscover them, like Robin Williams in Hook? Is it possible to find that pathway back again? There are certainly times when it feels impossible, and the speaker of this poem must be going through one of those times now. He pines for imagination, fantasy, freedom from responsibilities, but finds only another room with work to be done.

looking through the oubliette

I remember the stars

simonj
UK

I had to look up ‘oubliette’ for this one: “a secret dungeon with access only through a trap door in its ceiling.” The speaker has been imprisoned and abandoned to die in an inescapable pit without even a window to look out at the sky. The gap between the two lines creates an extra-long pause and makes visual the absence of hope and freedom in his life. He is left with only the memory of stars, twinkling in the darkness of his mind.

on and off stage the noise of you you YOU

Arvinder Kaur
Chandigarh, India

Sometimes a single person can dominate our lives, spoiling both our public and private moments (‘on and off stage’). The use of ‘noise’ and the final all-caps ‘YOU’ suggest an annoying buzzing in the speaker’s mind that only grows in intensity – this ‘you’ is overriding her own thoughts, drowning her peace of mind. This person most likely is an emotionally abusive figure in the speaker’s life, perhaps someone who is always negative and critical. The stage here can be metaphorical, any public scenario, such as a job, where the speaker feels she has to perform for others, put on a face to conceal the buzzing in her brain. But I get the impression that her private life ‘off stage’ is just another kind of performance, where she has to keep that face on even as the ‘you’ of the poem continues to berate her. Whether or not the person is still in her life, though, his presence continues to haunt her.

rat trap —
whether to spit or gulp
my bottled-up grief

Lakshmi Iyer
India

The speaker feels caught in the trap of life with nowhere to turn, only one decision to make: does she accept or reject the bitter taste of grief? The use of ‘bottled-up’ tells us that she has been holding in this grief for a long time, but it also hints at the grief being a kind of bottled liquid, a poison, which the speaker might see as a cure for her feelings. If she ‘gulp[s]’ down her grief, she gives in to it and allows it to consume her. If she rejects it, she chooses a life without it, a chance to move on. This is Hamlet deciding “whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.” It is Camus’s “one truly serious philosophical problem.” And when one feels like a rat in a trap, it is a difficult problem to solve.

feeding ground husband to my Venus fly trap

Kimberly A. Horning
St Augustine, Florida

Every time I read this poem, I want to pause after ‘feeding ground,’ taking it as a scene-setting fragment, but then my mind trips over ‘husband to my Venus fly trap,’ and I realize that the fly trap is eating ‘ground husband.’ I suppose one could make a case for the reading ‘feeding ground / husband to my Venus fly trap’ – the speaker having a special marital relationship with his plant in its ‘feeding ground’ – a Little Shop of Horrors situation. But I think the speaker is a wife fed up with her husband enough to grind him down into chunks of meat for the plant to consume the evidence. A grisly but patient crime. Using the full name of ‘Venus fly trap’ brings the goddess of love and pleasure (and sometimes war!) into the picture, so I imagine the speaker as a woman who, in the words of Sylvia Plath, “eat[s] men like air,” nearly literally in this case.

falling through
another star trap
spring romance

Lori Kiefer
UK

Kiefer captures the feeling of falling through the floor when we find someone to love – at least for a while. This may only be a spring fling, a seasonal love, like an allergy, coming and going with the seasons. It is a ‘trap,’ after all, and even if the speaker feels like she’s in space dancing among the stars, she very well may find herself crashing back to Earth before too long.

mouth
hell
rising
conscience
a
of
ghost
the

Shloka Shankar
India

Hamlet’s ghost appeared multiple times in submissions for this prompt, but Shankar’s take on the old king felt like encountering him for the first time. Reading the poem downward, we quickly discover that we’re not supposed to be descending through the ‘mouth / hell’ but ‘rising’ through the ‘hell / mouth,’ working our way up and out onto the stage, where we might act as ‘conscience’ to the poor prince who doesn’t know what to do. The phrasing ‘ghost / of / a / conscience’ also brings to mind the idiom “ghost of a chance,” perhaps implying that Hamlet doesn’t stand much of a chance in this endeavor – young Hamlet’s vengeance, oft delayed and tragically late, didn’t really help anyone in the end. This poem is abstract enough, too, that one could read it without any association with Hamlet and still be taken with its imagery and presentation. It could be interpreted as a description of the pang of conscience that hits people when faced with images of Hell, like the famous hellmouth paintings alluded to in the first/final two lines. Whether or not we believe in a hell, there is a tendency to straighten up, at least temporarily, when threatened with severe punishment. Perhaps it’s only the ‘ghost / of / a / conscience/ rising’ within us, nothing that’ll stick around very long, but it’s there for a moment – maybe long enough to keep us out of trouble (or maybe not…).

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.