Per Diem for February 2018: Memory
In February, the shortest month of the year, our Per Diem: Daily Haiku guest-editor, Neelam Dadhwal, invites us to expand our experience of the shortest form of poetry by reflecting on time past and the use of memory in forming haiku.
Read each poem carefully, let it recreate its reality in you, mull it over, and consider the role memory might have played in its creation… And remember to enjoy!
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Alan, I enjoyed all of your published memory haiku, but had to smile at super 8. Thankfully, it came with a note that mentioned home movies. Because where I live Super 8 is a well know motel for traveling families, so at first I had your family rambling and rattling around a crowded motel room! Oh, for footnotes! 🙂
Thanks Carole!
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Ah, Super 8, a term used for so many things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_8
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It was from a time when inventions were slowly happening that might be affordable to the ordinary working class families. I couldn’t stand to watch the family movie more than once, but they were brought out on a regular basis. But I might just stand to watch it one more time several decades later. 🙂
Thanks so much Neelam, for selecting this haiku to feature as part of Per Diem. It’s one of my favorites and has been published a few times but most notably as part of an article by Naomi Waken on Haiga for Shambhala Press . It’s also my favorite haiga and is framed and hanging on my kitchen wall. 🙂 Thanks again.
Congratulations, Neelam
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Dear Neelam Dadhwal,
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What a great theme! Whether it’s the Haiku Foundation per diem themes, or when haikai magazines carry a theme, it offers an invaluable service.
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I will be following your choices with great anticipation, thank you!
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Regarding memory, it begs several questions:
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“Do you remember certain floorboard creaks either in your childhood home, or when older, or staying over at someone else’s place?”
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chestnut moon shifting in my memory ghost floors
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Alan Summers
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Publication Credits:
Roadrunner 12.3 (December 2012)
LAKEVIEW International Journal of Literature and Arts Vol.1, No.1 February 2013
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And of course real, imagined, or somewhere in between memories on a journey?
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horses in the dusk. . .
half-remembered dreams
of a rail journey
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Alan Summers
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Publication credits:
hedgerow: a journal of small poems issue #53 (October 30, 2015)
European Haiku Society journal Makoto, A New Haiku Perpective issue 1:1 January 2, 2016
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And in mermoriam (i.m.)
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my inevitable death mayflies
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‘In memoriam’
Terry Pratchett OBE (28 April 1948 – 12 March 2015)
Novelist, author of the Discworld fantasy book series
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Alan Summers
Bones – journal for contemporary haiku no. 6 (March 2015)
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dry stone wall
Paddington Bear
out in the rain
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i.m. Michael Bond (13 January 1926 – 27 June 2017)
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Alan Summers
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Publication credits:
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Presence #58, July 2017)
Tinywords ISSUE 17.2 | 27 DECEMBER 2017
http://tinywords.com/2017/12/27/25493/
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And our family memories:
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super 8
the rattle
of family
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note: family “home movie” cameras to record holidays etc…
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Alan Summers
“Intimations” sequence, from the “Glass” section
Bones – journal for contemporary haiku no. 14 (November 2017)
http://www.bonesjournal.com/no14/bones14.pdf
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And those who may left all of us over two hundred years ago but still hold many of us in heart and mind:
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such old steps I water the sunflowers
for van Gogh
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Alan Summers
Stardust Haiku Issue 9 – September 2017
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Spacing correction:
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such old steps
I water the sunflowers
for van Gogh
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Alan Summers
Stardust Haiku Issue 9 – September 2017
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