re:Virals 475

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly commentary feature on some of your favorites among the best contemporary haiku and senryu written in English. This week’s poem, chosen by Linda A. Powers, was:

     
filled with sky
the voice of a child 
lost in play 
 
–Cora Whitmore
 Acorn: a Journal of Contemporary Haiku  Issue 47, Fall 2021

Introducing this poem, Linda writes:

I admire this haiku’s lovely intricacies, so many different interpretations are possible. The fullness of the sky contrasted with the idea of loss evokes poignant, autumnal feelings. The child’s voice is full of nature’s expanses and revels in the freedom to play. And yet, the ambiguous use of “lost” echoes in that sky.

Opening comment:

“…trailing clouds of glory do we come…Heaven lies about us in our infancy.” With some great lines, Wordsworth in Intimations of Immortality does go on a bit. Cora puts it in a nutshell. The sky as boundless possibilities, a blank canvas, a celestial wonder. Before “shades of the prison house close on” the growing child, and play is supplanted by work, by responsibilities; and the child that was lost in play, in daydreams, is brought down to earth, losing innocence.

This seasonless haiku reads well, too.

Melissa Dennison:

This is beautiful. The idea of the voice of a child filled with sky. Children can lose themselves in play for hours at a time, in a state of flow, as conceived by the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi. I wonder how many of us as adults experience a state of flow, in our busy, hectic lives.

Play is often dismissed as trivial or as just something that children do, but really it is critical, for children to grow and develop and also for adults too. We tend to forget this with the demands we and others makes on us, with our responsibilities, ambitions and concerns.

Maybe we all need to be more like children sometimes, allowing ourselves to be in this mental state of flow, losing ourselves completely in the moment of play.

Carol Reynolds:

This poem spoke to me personally and in my role as a grandmother and mother. Its words set the scene beautifully of a young child, lost in their own world becoming anyone or anything they wish to be through imaginative play and the joy experienced by someone watching and listening nearby.

It caused me to reflect on my childhood and compare it to that of my grandchildren and their future children. While this poem presented a positive image and feeling of hope, if reimagined it could reflect a negative and less hopeful image. A sky filled with noise and voices and a child lost without play.

As a child I lived on the fringes of Sydney alongside nature with so much space in which to dream, imagine and create. When my children arrived, together with the privilege of being a ‘stay at home’ mum, I was able to draw on my childlike qualities and instill the same sense of imagination and creativity into their play.

I have watched how life was, what it has become and unsure where it is going. Our living environment leaves limited space for imaginative play. Just to provide a home these days, few mums have the privilege of staying at home with their children in their early formative years to learn with each other or just watch an episode of Play School together. The advances in technology with respect to games and toys has all but killed the ability to create. Thank God for Lego. Then there is that essential ingredient, time. Those special quiet moments when you can dare to dream seem so few. Who has it!

Fortunately my early experiences are deeply entrenched and I still wake each day with a childlike spirit and a mind full of possibilities.

Dan Campbell:

Yes, what a wonderful poem we’ve found,
With a voice that is simple yet heavenly bound!
It’s filled with the fluffiest, puffiest air,
Where words tumble and jumble without any care!

The dozen minus one words are breezes on high,
As light as hops and skips in the sky.
But what does it mean, this sky-filling tone?
Is it laughter or longing, or just a muffled moan?

And where is the ground in this airy delight?
Are we lost in the clouds or just flying by night?
The poem’s too brief, like a hiccup or sneeze—
It’s nice but leaves you just dangling, stop it please!

For wonder’s a gift, it’s a spangleful thing,
But it needs just a thimbleful of tiddle ting ting.
A hint of the world where the child has roamed,
Not just the lost echoes of skies they’ve once combed.

Fatma Zora Habis:

This haiku captures the scene of a child joyfully playing alone, accompanied only by his voice. The writing describes it so beautifully that his sound fills the sky, drawing attention away from everything else around him. This haiku transports us from the immediate scene to a broader world.

Karen Harvey:

The sky is expansive, limitless, and so are the possibilities of make believe. I imagine a blue summer sky and the child playing outdoors oblivious to what else is going on. For me this is an uplifting poem. Beautiful.

Tigh Pogue:

foiled with sky
the voice of a child
lost in play
–Cora Whitmore

I am a little baffled by this one, but intrigued. What does it mean “foiled with sky”? I like the sound of it though.
Can it be that a child’s voice is turned to a metallic sheen like that of aluminium foil? Or the child, absorbed in play, somehow has her voice thwarted by the brilliance of the sky. It makes me think, for certain. I will come back to it and look again.

…

Oh, I see now that it is “filled” not “foiled”.

Well, that’s better, isn’t it?

Nairithi Konduru (aged 9):

This haiku could mean that a child is playing and is so immersed in it that they cannot think about the outside world. They are screaming as loud as possible and even the people very far away can hear the child’s voice lost in play. People may even start to think that God is reminding them of their childhood days.
This poem could also mean that a grown-up person is remembering their days of childhood.
It could also be a metaphor that our inner child is always there in the clouds and has not left us completely.

Lakshman Bulusu:

This haiku sets the tone of literally meaning sky is the limit-for anything from playing toys to imagination to wishes to dreams. The child is completely immersed in play and experiencing it from his point of view. He/she is unable to listen to the voices outside of his/her play zone.

The haiku starts with ‘sky’ in L1 and the sparkle is here. L2 and L3 provide the sustaining lines for L1.

‘sky’ and ‘child’ have been used in multiple ways, some metaphorically; some spiritually.

Jo McInerney—the unlimited possibilities of childhood:

I love a haiku that boggles the mind. Cora Whitmore’s opening line – filled with sky – prompts such expansion. For a moment I scrambled the syntax, wondering what could fill the boundless heavens. Then, on rereading, found other questions. What is being filled? How does such vast emptiness fill anything?

Line two supplies a possible answer that poses its own questions. It is perhaps ‘the voice of a child’ that is filled with sky. But that is not quite certain. There is no punctuation at the end of line one to indicate a cut, so it appears the adjectival opening describes a child’s voice. I have, however, a lingering sense of my initial misreading, imagining the child’s voice filling the sky. The interconnectedness of child and sky reminds me of Wordsworth’s ‘There was a boy’, where after the boy has called to the evening owls and silence returns, he feels as though ‘the voice / Of mountain torrents’ has entered him.

I studied this Wordsworth poem as a first-year English student and remember the lecturer, Chris Wallace Crabbe, proposing a reciprocal relationship between the perceiver and what is perceived. The external stimulus shapes the human consciousness which, in the act of perceiving, shapes what it sees and hears. I think Cora Whitmore’s haiku extends this conceit.

Line two is the haiku’s pivot, presenting the voice of a child, at once full of sky and, as line three states, ‘lost in play’. I imagine the child as being, like Wordsworth’s, out at the end of the day, lost in the wonder of the game and the open sky above. That sky and its limitless possibilities have entered the child and can be heard in the high, wild excitement of his/her cries.

A haiku that expands the mind and delights the heart.

Author Cora Whitmore:

It all began when I was walking down the trail along the Kenduskeag Stream in Bangor, Maine one sunny, clear, quiet morning and came upon a Father and his daughter who I would guess was about toddler age. She was playing alongside and near her Father and she seemed completely in her own little world as she talked to herself in soft tones. As I remember, this was still the time of covid lockdowns and people were keeping at a distance from one another, even outside. As I stepped around them at a six foot distance just listening, I had what seemed to be an otherworldly kind of momentary impression that the sky filled this child’s voice. That perhaps the Spirit world that this little girl was closer to than most adults by virtue of her very young age was an inseparable part of her voice and her entire being as she played. The oneness and interconnectedness of all that exists is something I wanted to express in this haiku. On the spiritual level where it is known that everything is energy, the sky cannot be separated from the child and her voice. It is all one interconnected flux of energy, constantly in motion, changing, flowing onward. I think the little girl in that space of her playing without a care and using her soft tones to express herself seemed to echo and be freely at one with this spiritual energy that is the essence of everything we are and see around us.

As someone who has done a lot of shamanic journeying and connecting with guides in the Spirit world, this encounter with the little girl along the stream fit easily into my experience.
I so often have felt that I am walking between worlds as a kind of mediator between them. I have lived a very solitary life as far as human contacts are concerned so there has been a space left open for this communing to happen.

Thanks to all who sent commentaries. As the contributor of the commentary reckoned best this week, Jo has chosen next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be as long or short, academic or spontaneous, serious or silly, public or personal as you like. All with respect for the poet. Out-takes from the best of these take their place in the THF Archives. Best of all, the chosen commentary’s author gets to pick the next poem.

Anyone can participate. Simply use the re:Virals commentary form below to enter your commentary on the new week’s poem (“Your text”) by the following Tuesday midnight, Eastern US Time Zone, and then press Submit to send your entry. The Submit button will not be available until Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in. We look forward to seeing your commentary and finding out about your favourite poems!

Poem for commentary:

     
false spring
the robin's egg blue
of fresh snow
—Laurie Greer
 The Heron’s Nest Volume XXVI, Number 1: March 2024

The Haiku Foundation reminds you that participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior from all parties. Please see our Code of Conduct policy.

Footnote:

Cora comments
”I will simply say that I have lived very close to wild nature and its many and diverse precious beings and loved them with all my heart. They have saved me and my life many times over and been constant and loyal friends and companions.”

Cora has many published haiku if you search.
—–

I suppose from Dan’s versified commentary that some readers may think this week’s verse tends away from real visual images towards generalisation or abstraction, and may be a little too ‘poetic’ for haiku; while if “Tigh Pogue’s” oblique comment is taken as more than a bagatelle, the suggestion at its end (phrased as a question) is that “filled with sky” is not poetic enough, and a little more disruption — such as an arresting/unexpected expression like “foiled with sky” — might add more magic and perhaps shake tantalizing meanings from a reader’s mind. The kind of approach that finds support in, for example, Peter Yovu’s commentary at the tail of Modern Haiku’s Haiku 2023 anthology. Up for discussion, sparing the poet’s feelings. Me, I like a wide variety diet in haiku, as long as it is not indigestible.

I recall that generic ‘sky’ has featured in verses such as Peter Newton’s “beam by beam / the old barn taken down / to sky“, Carole McRury’s “plein air painting / I fill my brush / with the sky“, and from LEAF issue 3 , April 2024 (verse for a shahai), Connie Pittman Ramsey’s “sky / two-thirds of my world / filled with you“. And on lost children, we lately have Garry Gay’s “from the corn maze / the laughter / of lost children” in this year’s THF volunteer anthology, (a verse that was clipped to my file of favourites for the year).

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