HAIKU DIALOGUE – Wanderlust – Seeking/Venturing Out – commentary

Wanderlust with Guest Editor Marietta McGregor

Toddlers live in the present. Family forms the boundaries of their small world. It’s only as we grow up that we start to dream and plan to be somewhere else, to experience something new. Many writers have woven narratives around their travels. Hans Christian Andersen believed that to travel is to live. Aesop maintained that adventure is worthwhile. Do you have favourite travel tales you trot out to family and friends? I certainly do. They tell me they enjoy them, but I wonder if they’re just being polite. Travel is personal, after all. It’s what you alone see and how it makes you feel. Call it wanderlust or what you will, the urge to experience something new and different has long captured our imaginations. I’d like our first prompt to be about real-life journeys as you coddiwomple along, enjoying the trip while perhaps not knowing the destination. Prompt 2 will relate more to how we travel in our minds, whether it’s to the past, the future, or to some fictional realm we conjure up that feels very real.

Below is Marietta’s commentary for Seeking/Venturing Out:

on the bus—
variety
from block to block

Patricia Carragon
Brooklyn, NY, USA

For me, this quietly voiced haiku epitomises the simplicity we sometimes lose sight of when we’re tempted to search for ever more novel travel experiences. Even during the most mundane of daily journeys to and from work, visiting friends, attending appointments or shopping, a keen observer with a good eye for the trifles of everyday life on the streets where they live can find many things of interest that lend themselves perfectly to writing a “poem in a breath”. I enjoyed this poem for its gentle observation reminding us of the everyday urban journeys we can take to inspire our haiku.

desert road trip
spotting the first
last chance sign

Steve Bahr
Roseburg, OR

What most impresses travelers driving on outback desert roads in Australia’s Northern Territory and around the Grand Circle of national parks of the southwestern United States is the sheer vastness of landscape unreeling in front of them. Unlike autoroutes and autostrade of Europe with their regular rest stops and modern restaurants, desert roads travel straight as arrows for miles with very few signs of habitation. Here I imagine a family primed for a long trip and on the lookout for landmarks, or anything at all to break the monotony. Suddenly, a crucial decision must be made. Does this sign indeed mean the ‘last chance’ to get some refreshments, top up the tank or see some unmissable national wonder? The haiku implies not. The sign is the ‘first / last chance’ so we imagine the writer has been here before and is a wake-up to these repeated pleas to drop in. The hint of humorous irony (and perhaps resignation?) in this haiku was welcome and made me smile.

childhood shortcut—
I part the brambles
with a cane

Sandip Chauhan
USA

The writer is exploring a familiar path, one taken when they were young. Children always love shortcuts, although sometimes the quickest way is not always the easiest. No matter. They scramble through, in and over all sorts of obstacles — fences, mud, prickly bushes — arriving home disheveled and happy. Here, we don’t really know if ‘the brambles’ have become more overgrown than they were when the youngster detoured. What we do learn in lines 2 and 3 is that it is the writer whom age has changed. The juxtaposition of two different ends of a life does not need to rely on verb tenses here. While the haiku is set in the present, it brings past and present together as the writer, on returning to their old haunts, now needs to ‘part the brambles / with a cane’. What touches me in this haiku is its sense of poignancy and the inevitability of those changes we experience as we travel through life.

without knowing
where we’re headed—
bow-riding dolphins

Ivan Georgiev
Germany

From contemplation of the known past we now turn to a haiku about the future. There’s something wonderfully uplifting about watching a pod of dolphins surfing ahead of a boat we’re embarked on. It’s tempting to imagine they’re familiars escorting us to our destination. This anthropomorphic view of course belies reality — they’re playful and intelligent mammals and the speeding boat pushes forward a bow wave which gives them lift and propels them faster. The writer dives deeper in lines 1 and 2 of this haiku. It’s not only the wild creatures who don’t know where the journey ends, we humans are just as unknowing as the dolphins are about what lies in our future.

desert sun
my shadow in the foreground
of every photo

Louise Hopewell
Australia

In a time of selfies and influencers most of whom want their faces to have top billing, this haiku reveals something about the writer, as well as the photographer. They may be one and the same. We can guess the photos are being taken either in the early morning or late in the day during golden hour when the light is best for landscape photography, and shadows stretch longer and provide a more stark contrast. The shots could be taken by someone else contre-jour, facing into the sun, or the photographer could be shooting with the sun behind themselves. Either way, as we are in the desert, by including the tonal contrast of their own shadow the photographer may be deliberately seeking to add a human scale to the wide-open spaces around them. And by anchoring themselves in each scene, the photographer becomes part of the environment everywhere they stop. The haiku also conveys the sense that no matter where we travel, we cannot escape who we are.

heard in the desert
a red-breasted nuthatch
from my childhood

Cynthia Anderson
Yucca Valley, California

Another haiku which features ‘desert’ and ‘childhood’ in its elements, but this time the key to the writer’s time travel is a lingering memory of a sound. As an Australian interested in birds, I had to read about this songbird because I was not familiar with it. The ‘red-breasted nuthatch’ is a small boreal bird, usually inhabiting North American coniferous forests. Its call has been described as nasal and distinctive, like a tiny tin horn. Our brain can store sounds for many years. Familiar acoustic cues trigger our long-term auditory memory so we recall an exact sound we heard as a child and we remember what makes it. The writer hears this remembered nuthatch call not in a forest but in the desert. Why is the small bird so far from its normal range? Is there some irruptive climatic or habitat trigger such as shortage of food that caused it to migrate here? The haiku which at first seems like a delightful nature observation takes on darker overtones.

hearth smoke
lingering in my shawl
milestones blur

Arvinder Kaur
Chandigarh, India

Olfaction, or the sense of smell, is one of our keenest senses. It’s vital for our safety, health and survival. Scents trigger memories of family, events, emotions, past times, and play a key part in our social interactions and bonds. Here I picture the writer leaving from somewhere and heading home, perhaps having attended a religious ceremony or gathering where the scent of smoke was a familiar and comfortably nostalgic smell, evocative of shared meals and family companionship. The visit has lasted for some time, long enough for clothes to be imbued with subtle traces of clean woodsmoke or incense, olfactory memories that they now carry away with them. The juxtaposition in line 3 conveys a sense of distance as well as sadness, with way markers on the route appearing blurred, perhaps by the traveler’s tears.

slipping and sliding
I grasp a stranger’s arm
back to the tour bus

Greer Woodward
Kamuela, HI

When we travel to unfamiliar places we can be at our most vulnerable. That doesn’t deter us from traveling, but can result in our reacting in ways we would not when we’re close to home and maintaining our acceptable social distance from strangers. This haiku captures just such a fleeting moment of fragility, when normal personal space barriers drop, and the writer reaches out to someone they don’t know for help. This haiku is a small journey within a journey from spatial distance to physical proximity, when one person puts their trust in another for the briefest of moments. In terms of its structure, the haiku is a 5/6/5 format, but no words are wasted in creating an intimate picture.

Chinese street market
the taste of new words
on my tongue

Annie Wilson
Shropshire, UK

Who doesn’t love a good street market? Exotic smells, vibrant colours, plenty of noise, unfamiliar things for sale, challenging every sense. All are what make markets in other parts of the world so exciting. This haiku explores another sense to those of sight, hearing, and smell we’ve encountered in other haiku here — that of taste, but rather than being literally expositional, the writer uses synesthesia. Linking taste with language is what gives this haiku its distinctiveness. A word to describe the comfort or otherwise of attempting to speak in a new tongue has been borrowed from the German — Sprachgefühl. As the writer speaks in an unaccustomed language, perhaps hoping to buy lunch, the flavors of the market are interwoven with the sounds and unfamiliar tactile feeling in the mouth of spoken words, heightening the rich impact of the whole travel experience.

turning the map until the river runs downhill

C.X. Turner
U.K.

Most planimetric maps don’t indicate in which direction a river flows. I admit I’ve fallen into the illogical mental trap of thinking that a river should run “down the map”, that is, south, when in fact rivers can run towards any compass point, and their directions rely on local topography. Turning the map might change the view of a river, but it cannot alter contour lines and landscape features. In this case, maybe the writer is an expert kayaker, knows their rivers and thus knows full well to turn a paper map so that contour lines echo the flow of the river. I enjoyed this one-line haiku because I found it gently humorous and relatable. And I love paper maps!

Join us next week for our next prompt…

Bios:

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 biological 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.

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 Credits:

Banner Photo & Prompt Photo credits: 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. Read past Haiku Dialogue posts here.