HAIKU DIALOGUE – Finding peace and contemplation… in quiet spaces… in a second-hand bookshop

Finding peace and contemplation… in quiet spaces with Guest Editor Marietta McGregor

At times in our lives, fast-moving events of our day-to-day existence may become overwhelming. Between work and family responsibilities, daily needs and doomscrolling, days rush by in a breakneck blur and we sometimes end the week with a sense of ‘where did that go?’ We’re surrounded by the wonders of our shared universe. Maybe it’s time to become immersed in the enjoyment of one aspect of this spectacular world which amazes, delights and refreshes us. We can marvel at the night sky or clouds by day, cheer a ladybug as it climbs a twig and opens its wings, dangle our feet in a cool river, rest in a tree’s benevolent shade, stroke velvety green moss, smell ozone freshness at the coast, crunch through frosty grass, listen to morning birdsong, taste a last autumn apple. Small pauses in quotidian life may be devoted to living slower, using every sense, and sharing our pleasure through poetry. Simple gifts.

Each week for the next few weeks there will be a photographic prompt on the theme of ‘Finding peace and contemplation. . .’ with images capturing moments when we might seek inspiration if the going gets tough. I look forward to reading your personal response to the moments you’ve discovered.

next week’s theme: … in a gallery

Becoming immersed in a work of art encourages us to reflect on the artist and their world, as well as our own. When we enter a gallery, freed from bustling city streets we slow down, drop our voices, calm monkey minds, and begin to appreciate new perspectives. The atmosphere is soothing, almost a meditation. Everyone has their own reasons for attending museums and art galleries. Permanent collections become havens, and some people re-visit favourite works as they would treasured friends. Special exhibitions generate a buzz of excited interest, and stimulate different ways of looking. This photograph shows part of the collections of The Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts, a lovely gallery set in stunning wooded grounds. I welcome your haiku about how time out in your favourite arts centre helps you unwind.

The deadline is midnight Eastern Standard Time, Saturday March 12, 2022.

Please use the Haiku Dialogue submission form below to enter one or two original unpublished haiku inspired by the week’s theme, and then press Submit to send your entry. (The Submit button will not be available until the Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in.) With your poem, please include any special formatting requirements & your name & residence as you would like it to appear in the column. 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 Marietta’s commentary for in a second-hand bookshop:

Thank you poets for your bookish contemplation this week. Lost in the pages of old books some of you discovered echoes of your own history. Some found traces of others’ stories in the form of intriguing margin notes, pressed buttonholes, four-leaf clovers, significant dog-ears, underlines and secreted letters. I was looking for original takes on the bookshop/old books theme, and if there were several poems along similar lines I have not always included them. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the selection, and find haiku which resonate with you to comment on. Thanks as always to Kathy, Lori and THF for coordinating Haiku Dialogue.

letting him
read me
annotated book

Vandana Parashar
India

A spare first-person haiku which in the reading opens up several possibilities. Has the poet chosen to reveal their inner being to a lover through carefully staged real-life actions or words? Or is the subject of L1 a new acquaintance, perhaps someone encountered at a book club or poetry reading, who is offered a book with personal notes inscribed which may help open the poet’s heart to a receptive reader? Either way, I think the poet is keen for this person to get to know them better.

used copies of Gatsby
he holds each vintage
to his nose

Laurie Greer
Washington, DC

An interesting juxtaposition. The protagonist here is cast in the role of connoisseur, apparently sniffing their way through a flight of early editions of the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel set in the Roaring Twenties, America’s Jazz Age. Do these old editions have their own individual scent, depending upon whose shelves they resided? Considering that bootleg liquor flowed freely through the pages of the Gatsby novel, perhaps the copies are redolent of that time, as captured in the haiku. Another reading could set the poem in the book-lined library of a discerning bibliophile who likes to browse his collection with a fine vintage claret or port (or several) at his elbow.

beach read
a breeze gives away
the ending

Kristen Lindquist
Maine, USA

Readers of my acquaintance fall into two main groups – those who always turn to the back page before finishing a novel, and the rest who don’t want the end revealed because it spoils the story. I admit to the occasional flip over if I desperately want to know if a character is still present in the closing pages, or has been killed off (if the latter, I still finish the book but with a stronger sense of impending doom). Beach reads tend to be quite light and not too gripping. Maybe the poet has dozed off in the warm sun, book open beside them. As they sleep, the pages are being riffled by a sea breeze and the ending is revealed, but does the sunbather see it, or does the book close again before they wake?

next to recipes
for bouillabaisse
The Origin of Species

Keith Evetts
Thames Ditton, UK

Like haiku poetry, second-hand bookshops can be eclectic, even eccentric, in their juxtapositions. In this haiku, the poet observes Charles Darwin and cookery cheerfully co-existing side by side on a shelf. Bouillabaisse is called the king of fish soups. A speciality of Marseilles, it’s believed to have been invented to use up ugly and unsaleable, but tasty, spiny fish such as the rascasse, a type of scorpion fish. Any fish can go in, heads, tails and all, along with saffron, fennel, orange zest and Pernod. The brew must be boiled hard and long. The best examples take days to cook, during which a sort of culinary magic occurs. In a letter to a friend, Darwin laid the foundation for the biogenic ‛primordial soup’ theory, expounded in the 1920s by Haldane and Oparin, where building blocks of DNA coalesced from a simmering aqueous solution of organic molecules derived from early Earth’s atmospheric gases. A clever juxtaposition that works well.

moving for the last time
i choose my companion
books carefully

Susan Farner
USA

Anyone with a treasured book collection knows how hard the task of culling can be, despite Marie Kondo telling us that 30 books are quite enough to own. As we age we often find the need to downsize, and that means possessions must be shed. Well-loved books are good friends, some of which are for life. The poet understands that change is inevitable and has come to embrace this, but that doesn’t necessarily make the job any easier. The haiku to me has a melancholy tone, conveying a sense of the inevitability of change, and wabi, of serene acceptance.

& here are the rest of the selections:

the scent
of a cracked spine
vellichor

Shloka Shankar
India

 

taking a look at
the life of the others
public bookcase . . .

Deborah Karl-Brandt
Bonn, Germany

 

second-hand book
between its pages
a pressed poppy flower

Olivier Schopfer
Geneva, Switzerland

 

tales of war—
behind a used book
the spider weaves

Vincenzo Adamo
Italy

 

dollhouse
in the bedroom a tattered book
of Andersen’s tales

Tsanka Shishkova
Bulgaria

 

used book
the underlined portions
tell a different story

Ram Chandran
India

 

at the bookstore
I hesitate in between
War and Peace and Idiot

Željko Vojković
Croatia

 

war at hand
I look out for a book
of love poems

Teji Sethi
India

 

bookmark . . .
heart-shaped skeleton leaf
says it all

Lakshmi Iyer
Trivandrum, India

 

book exchange our hearts race

Roberta Beach Jacobson
Indianola, Iowa, USA

 

Little Women . . .
so many memories
when I was a girl

Rosa Maria Di Salvatore
Catania (Italy)

 

back again browsing—
the book i didn’t go in for
finds me

Alan Peat
Biddulph, United Kingdom

 

store shuttered
the scent of paperbacks
stacked in the rain

Pris Campbell
United States

 

overfilled shelves—
volume after volume
about warfare

Mark Meyer
Mercer Island, WA USA

 

blank page of a book
my late father’s handwritten
driving directions

Jackie Chou
Pico Rivera CA USA

 

hunger pangs—
rusty pages and silverfish
for half a penny

R. Suresh Babu
India

 

old dream book—
what it means
to dream nothing

Aljoša Vuković
Šibenik, Croatia

 

war-torn world
I travel back
with old books

Priti Khullar
India

 

deep spring—
lost in Saijiki
at a book café

Teiichi Suzuki
Japan

 

dust on a book—
i wipe off stagnant
years

Richa Sharma
India

 

second-hand book
tracing the frayed spine
of an old friend

Firdaus Parvez
India

 

strict silence
from a corner cubicle
a knuckle cracker

Ingrid Baluchi
North Macedonia

 

in a cookbook
mother’s handwriting
second-hand bookshop

Mirela Brăilean
Romania

 

folded cold inside the used bookshop butterfly

simonj
UK

 

second-hand store
on my knees
book foraging

Suzanne Leaf-Brock
Pine Island, Minnesota

 

love poetry
a pen-underlined verse
on the last page

Slobodan Pupovac
Zagreb, Croatia

 

secondhand bookshop
lingering with Wang Wei
birds calling in the ravine

Helga Stania
Switzerland

 

sepia forest
lost inside the pages
with the author

Ravi Kiran
India

 

chypre scent
of bygone days . . .
old bookshop

profumo cipriato
di tempi passati . . .
vecchia libreria

Daniela Misso
Italia

 

flea market—
the past owner’s thoughts
in an old poem book

Milan Rajkumar
Imphal, India

 

Book of the Dead
key from afterlife
to the life

Stoianka Boianova
Bulgaria

 

Eureka!
leaving the library
full of ideas

Franjo Ordanić
Croatia

 

shredded pages
in the book store
a brown mouse

Marilyn Ward
Scunthorpe Lincolnshire UK

 

sea-breeze
in the smell of old pages
a long-distance love

Sonika Jaiganesh
United Kingdom

 

bookstore escape
the travel choices
in Steinbeck and Swift

Richard Matta
San Diego, California

 

fiction all those happy endings

Dan Campbell
Virginia

 

Grandma’s war chest
a hand me down book
on girl guiding

Robert Kingston
Chelmsford, United Kingdom

 

moving house
nothing but books and
Confucius himself

夫子迁新居
未见细软与珍宝
唯有万卷书

fu zi qian xin ju
wei jian xi ruan yu zhen bao
wei you wan juan shu

Xiaoou Chen
Kunming, China

 

pre-loved books
all the dog eared pages
in the romance section

Louise Hopewell
Australia

 

between the pages
a love letter
not meant for me

Margaret Mahony
Australia

 

the faint scent
of another’s pressed rose
second-hand Love Story

Meera Rehm
UK

 

the rust
on The Mill on the Floss . . .
dusty store

Arvinder Kaur
Chandigarh, India

 

another story
in the second hand book
a four-leaf clover

Nazarena Rampini
Italia

 

rummaging through a stranger’s words four-leaf clover

Eva Limbach
Germany

 

second-hand bookshop
I quietly slip down
Alice’s rabbit hole

Baisali Chatterjee Dutt
Kolkata, India

 

early spring breathing the peace bibliosmia

Neena Singh
Chandigarh, India

 

first love . . .
at the second-hand bookstore
lost and found

Anna Yin
Ontario, Canada

 

used books
self-help buried under
love poetry

Bryan Rickert
Belleville, Illinois USA

 

in need of a happy ending reading the last chapter first

Kathleen Trocmet
Texas, USA

 

floor to ceiling
the owner goes straight
to the book I ask for

Cynthia Anderson
Yucca Valley, California

 

armload of books
the knowing nods
of the cashier

Pat Davis
NH USA

 

all these worlds
consisting of words . . .
library

Marianne Sahlin
Sweden

 

old cooking book
mom’s humming from the page
of my favorite pie

Keiko Izawa
Yokohama, Japan

 

LIVING LARGE
a selection of books
with 18 point fonts

Valentina Ranaldi-Adams
Fairlawn, Ohio USA

 

covering titles
in the window display
bookstore cats

Caroline Giles Banks
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

 

tattered bible
reading scribbled notes
to my older self

Jeff Leong
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

 

used bookstore
chance encounters
with marginalia

Helen Ogden
Pacific Grove, CA

 

highlights
in the secondhand book
I connect with a stranger

Padma Rajeswari
Mumbai, India

 

autumn smell . . .
a library ticket in
the second hand book

Minal Sarosh
Ahmedabad, India

 

after the bombing . . .
War and Peace
falls off the shelf

Melanie Vance
USA

 

in the shadows
of old rose bushes . . .
bibliosmia

Alfred Booth
Colombes, France

 

old corner bookstore
re-reading the story book
mom read to me first

Joe Sebastian
Bangalore, India

 

looking for Proust . . .
the scent of time
whispers secrets

Elisa Allo
Zig, Switzerland

 

huddled together
Ginsberg, Kerouac, Bukowski . . .
a stranger’s smile at my delight

Madhuri Pillai
Australia

 

on the flyleaf
a spidery
ex libris

Ann Smith
United Kingdom

 

book club—
exchanging more
than words . . .

C.X. Turner
United Kingdom

 

new novel
I set out to live
a king’s life

Mona Bedi
Delhi, India

 

grassy scents
in the old library . . .
my father so close

Giuliana Ravaglia
Bologna Italia

 

stroke of midnight I turn into a book

Lafcadio Orlovsky
USA

 

bookshop step stool
already in use
hey sleepy kitty!

Maxianne Berger
Outremont, Quebec

 

second-hand bookstore—
a blue and yellow candle
lit in the corner

Xenia Tran
Scotland

 

road side book stall—
with a cup of coffee I meet
Jean Valjean

Hla Yin Mon
Yangon, Myanmar

 

overdue:
the librarian’s
baby

Barrie Levine
Massachusetts, United States

 

treasure island—
in the children’s section
unearthing gems

Dorothy Burrows
United Kingdom

 

time traveling in
second-hand bookshop . . . hours
go by like seconds

Margie Gustafson
Lombard, IL USA

 

stacks of used books
I straighten my spine
before walking in

Sari Grandstaff
Saugerties, NY

 

first edition
getting a whiff
of old rags

Bona M. Santos
Los Angeles, CA

 

the bell
in the olde bookshop
mockingbird

Peggy Bilbro
Alabama

 

dimly lit store
he passes me the warmth
of a dog-eared book

sanjuktaa asopa
India

 

head over heels
between aisles
preloved books

Kanjini Devi
The Far North, Aotearoa NZ

 

crowded bookstore
reading out loud
an old love novel

Eufemia Griffo
Italy

 

watching it tumble
from the musty book heap—
She Stoops to Conquer

Margaret Tau
New Bern, North Carolina

 

escaping the heat—
I enter the bookshop
into autumn

Ash Lippert
United States

 

missing “M” and “R”
remaining volumes
in the free bin

Greer Woodward
Waimea, HI

 

vintage bookstore
savoring the scent
of second chances

Sharon Martina
Illinois, USA

 

not the ones
I would have starred
used anthology

Tim Cremin
Massachusetts

 

book shop affogato
finishing my Calvino before
the ice cream melts

Kath Abela Wilson
Pasadena, California

 

slithers
through leaves of grass
the silverfish

P. H. Fischer
Vancouver, Canada

Guest editor Marietta McGregor is a fourth-generation Tasmanian who has made her home between Australia’s national capital Canberra and the scenic south coast of New South Wales for over four decades. A lover of the natural world since childhood, she went on to study botany and zoology, and has worked as palynologist, garden designer, science journalist, editor, university tutor, education manager, and grants developer for the national wildlife collection. A photography and travel enthusiast since retiring, she enjoys capturing fine detail of fleeting moments. She came late to haiku, which appealed for its close observation and poetic expression of ephemeral experience. Her haiku, haibun and haiga have been widely published, have won awards and appear in anthologies.

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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