HAIKU DIALOGUE – Looking Out – into our world – commentary

Looking Out with Guest Editor Marietta McGregor

The phrase ‛looking out’ can mean to be on the watch in case something unexpected should happen. We shout, “Look out!” if we see danger approaching. We build physical lookouts. They may take the form of tall steel and wooden towers used as vantage points to search for forest fires, a crow’s nest high on a ship’s mast, periscopes on a submarine, or wooden clifftop decks on headlands overlooking scenic coastal vistas for travelers’ photo stops. Human lookouts are people whose job it is to warn against hazards on land and at sea. ‛Looking out’ can also mean observing our surroundings. As well as our own finely tuned senses, we use a variety of instruments to help us see more of the world. Microscopes and electron microscopes allow us to scrutinise very small things. Medicine makes use of X-rays, ultraviolet light and radio waves for scanning the body. Binoculars and telescopes help us look out beyond the planet. From our earliest existence, we look outwards to the world for a holistic view, through our parents and other family members, teachers, books, radio, TV and the internet. Space beckons us. And, of course, we look out for each other, to help in times of need or stress.

Below is Marietta’s commentary for Looking Out – into our world:

white noise
the changing channels
of our conversation

Pippa Phillips
Greensboro, North Carolina

The line 1 fragment of this poem immediately establishes a time or place when something is half-heard or half-experienced. White noise is background frequency which effectively cancels out other sounds, and is used, for example, in audio headphones to exclude extraneous noise, a boon for long-distance air travelers who like their sleep undisturbed by jet roar. The juxtaposition afforded by lines 2 and 3 evokes an exchange between two or more people who may have known each other for some time. Talk is no longer deeply engaged and passionate, but instead drifts back and forth in a desultory fashion, half-heard, half-blanked out. This haiku, or senryu, calls to mind a 1966 Simon and Garfunkel song, “The Dangling Conversation,” where a couple mourn former intimacy, lost to indifference and social alienation. A more cheerful reading could be that the poem is capturing the buzz of a lively dinner party, where ideas and subjects are bandied about freely and interchangeably.

He-Man mastering the universal remote

Susan Burch
Hagerstown, MD

It’s not often that ‘He-Man’ features in a senryu, but here he is! A Master of the Universe surely becomes a true hero when he, or indeed she, can call up closed captions at will (or remove them!), mute intrusive ads and switch channels from news to cartoons with one mighty button press. An amusing one-line senryu for the times.

sounding out the names of trees MRI

Lorraine A Padden
San Diego, California

I was immediately drawn to this monostich. Suffering from a knee injury, I was once referred for magnetic resonance imaging to probe for soft tissue damage. The technician’s command not to move a muscle, the awkward feel of sandbags holding my knee rigidly still, and the pulsing roar of the machine that felt as if it were throbbing in my blood made the experience daunting. Counting backwards from 1,000 was suggested as displacement activity to take my mind off discomfort. In this poem the speaker chants what may be a litany of binomial Latin names, Linnaeus’s classification of trees. Or it may be something more comfortingly simple. Familiar common names of rowanberry, juniper, liquidamber, linden, shag bark hickory, sugar maple, loblolly pine, redwood, white dogwood are magic runes that lead the mind into quiet forests, far away from the diagnostic table and its booming apparatus.

cease-fire news
bubbles from a plastic wand
floating toward the sun

Deborah A. Bennett
Illinois USA

We all react to news stories in different ways, but when something finally happens which we’ve all longed for, we certainly feel joy. The welcome news of a cease-fire and the heightened hope that peace may follow have the power to uplift our hearts. Like the rainbow bubbles a child blows we feel somehow freer, and much happier. The poem with its ‘bubbles’ heading up to the sun successfully evokes that feeling.

night wind
when the tv’s off
and there’s no one else awake

Tony Williams
Scotland, UK

In this poem we imagine a moment of quiet solo contemplation after an evening’s viewing of the hurly-burly on the “box.” Most of the household have retired for the night, and the last one awake re-tunes to the natural world. Maybe they venture outside and find it breezier than it was that afternoon. Or maybe in the new silence of their living room they now pick up on how their house is tuned into the wind, with tiny creaks, groans and shifts in its timbers, window frames and eaves. For me as reader, this haiku conveys a sense of calm domesticity.

fangirling
grandma confesses how much she likes
Wangxian

Deborah Karl-Brandt
Bonn, Germany

Two more terms that don’t often appear in haiku are used in this amusing senryu. We have a ‘fangirling’ grandmother who obviously has not lost her zest for new experiences, as she is an ardent follower of anime which usually attract a more youthful dedicated fandom. In line 2 a rather loaded word describes grandma’s admission of devotion – ‘confesses.’ We have to ask why she feels she has to confess. Is it the obsessional nature of fangirling at her good age, or is there something else more unconventional about ‘Wangxian’ that makes grandma a little bit nervous about admitting she is into it. We readers are taken on an unconventional jaunt ourselves, but grandma has said enough to make us think.

late night TV
we yawn at the birth
of a galaxy

Keith Evetts
Thames Ditton, UK

Since color tv launched we’ve enjoyed interplanetary and interstellar journeys with a remarkable pantheon of astronomers and cosmologists – Carl Sagan, Patrick Moore, Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox to name a few. Their shows are recycled endlessly and often turn up towards the end of a night’s viewing program. Whether the subject is deep space or dark matter, these shows have an almost hypnotic effect on the viewer, I find. Pairing glorious space telescope imagery with an intimate commentary of someone devoted to their field of study backed by gentle instrumentals has a mesmeric effect, lulling us into a sort of scientific trance which not even the biggest bangs of the universe’s genesis can penetrate. We can’t help but yawn, and while it’s not from boredom it should be a sign to go to bed if we can finally rouse ourselves off the couch.

Join us next week for our next prompt…

Guest editor Marietta McGregor is a retired Tasmanian botanist and journalist who has made her home between 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 natural sciences, and has worked as palynologist, garden designer, science journalist, editor, university tutor, education manager, and grants developer for the national wildlife collection. 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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Banner photo credit: Marietta McGregor

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.