re:Virals 515
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. In the host chair today is Shawn Blair. This week’s poem, chosen by Sudha Devi Nayak was:
in search of attachment a green tendril waving in stillness —Jeffrey Ferrara The Mainichi Haiku in English, June 7th, 2025
Introducing this poem, Sudha writes:
In this beautiful haiku the gentle tendril waving in the breeze looking for love and attachment is indeed a metaphor for human life. All of us are forever seeking to belong to someone, to own a relationship, to surrender to love, the most poignant of all emotions that rules our life. Often in life we may be disappointed but hope doesn’t give up so easily, it clings to the very idea of love and may even find it in the most difficult of conditions. The yearning and the need to love and to be surpassingly important to someone is what the human condition is about. Even when we don’t attain the object of our love the fact that we have loved is in itself an ennobling experience.
The young tendril quivering tells us to live, love and continue to hope.
Opening comment (Shawn):
1) Centered in this verse is the simple image of a green tendril, with no specified visual background. On a windless day, the tendril sways. It is a basic observation, but colored by our knowledge it gains complexity: we think of the tendril as in a kind of limbo, between homes, reaching out until it finds something it can latch onto. In this uncertain pause, this gap between solid things, reside the mysteries of the universe.
2) “Life is but a motion of limbs,” wrote Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651). “For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body.”
3) With his distinctive Bavarian drawl, Werner Herzog narrates the words—in search of attachment, a green tendril waving in stillness—as we watch a time-lapse video of a single green tendril reaching up and out, spiraling into the great unknown. Continuing his voiceover, Herzog says “Only in this state of sublimity does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual.”
4) Yatsuka Ishihara proposed that “In haiku the subject is always “I”, but the “I” is implied, not directly expressed. Whatever the subject, whether you, he, she, or it, it is always I.”
Alan Harvey:
This engaging haiku evokes a sense of the newborn in me. This could be an observational haiku—watching pea plants grow up a trellis. But it goes to my heart when I think of newborns reaching out for the first time. The young of a species, when newly born, reach out into the new world of which they are being born. The fawn or colt standing on wobbly legs with their mother standing nearby. A human baby can’t even manage that. But their little fists reach out and attach themselves to a pinkie finger. This is where I find a poignant sense of intimacy in this poem.
L1 sets us up nicely with “in search of attachment”. The longing to be connected to something or someone is primal. Reaching out is an evolutionary prerequisite just as the pea vine needs to attach itself to the trellis. In L2, the pea plant’s “green tendril” reaches out into its surrounding space and searches for some support to continue its growth. Ferrara lands this haiku with a quiet moment “waving in stillness”. Evolution dominates natural selection but it does it quietly in stillness.
Jeffrey Ferrara artfully encapsulates a dynamic, primeval force in a soft haiku moment.
Sitarama Seshu Maringanti:
The haiku challenges one’s intellect. Stillness is not like a vacuum which nature abhors. It is the depiction of a phenomenon—the absence of wind or air, a situation of inertia when nothing is prompted to move, even the highly sensitive tendril of a creeper seeking to attach itself to the nearest branch or twig of a mother plant. The haiku describes the soft green colour of a tendril as an aside. The tendril is by nature so sensitive that its finely tuned ‘hairs’ grow towards the nearest available support to clutch and entwine and grow. It however needs the subtle assistance of a mild wind to move towards and attach itself to its mother plant. It cannot do so in an adverse situation like stillness. This interplay and dependence between two participants in nature has been beautifully presented in the haiku.
Harrison Lightwater—not as simple as it seems:
At first sight this verse is suggestive of every living thing’s need for connection with another, for contact. Maybe for love. Setting this in the detached natural context of a plant tendril is at once appealing to the haiku poet. Although there isn’t, as far as I’m aware, a formal kigo, the seasonal context is the growing season, spring. There’s the unspoken thought that we can identify with the tendril. Particularly when we’re young.
If we’re to generalize from the tender tendril to our human need for attachment, careful! The tendril is looking for a host to support it in its climb towards the light. The host doesn’t matter to it, although some plants that climb by this means have receptors to reject their own kind. Many of them compete with and damage the host. From bindweed and dodder through ivy to the passionflower and the grapevine, sentimentality is not a factor in their clinging.
And so on reflection this haiku is not as simple as it seems. A universal need for attachment, yes. But how do we feel about clingers that fasten on to us?
I added the word “thigmotropism” to my vocabulary. Thanks for that!
Author Jeffrey Ferrara:
I am grateful to Sudha Devi Nayak for choosing my haiku for this week’s column. Many thanks, Sudha!
In place of a prose commentary, I found myself writing this haiku in the same vein:
pole beans—
a botanical intelligence
extends into space
Thanks to all who sent commentaries. As the contributor of the commentary reckoned best this week, Harrison Lightwater has chosen next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be short, or of moderate length, academic, your personal response, spontaneous, or idiosyncratic. As long as it focuses on the verse presented, and with respect for the poet, all genuine reader reaction, criticism, and pertinent discussion is of value. Out-takes are kept 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:
the garden snail on our driveway Ukraine talks — Archie G. Carlos tsuri-dōrō Issue #27 – May/June 2025
Footnote:
Jeffrey Ferrara “is an haiku apprentice living in Worcester, Massachusetts”. A winner in the 2020 Vancouver Haiku Invitational (Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival), a short interview with Jeffrey can be found here.
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Received after the deadline from Tom Clausen:
When I go on a daily walk with our little dog he treats it as a major olfactory adventure and detective mission with lots of serious sniffing and marking of those spots that seem in need of a new scent. While he is doing that I am looking for little tendrils of wild grape vines and other plants who have similar reaching probes of growth seeking a route to the light. So many of these twisting tendrils are looking for attachment and a good grasp on anything that gets them to a better hold to reach ever further. Reading Jeffrey’s haiku gave me an immediate connection to what I look for and document in photos on many days. I especially like the mystery left to the reader in line three—”waving in stillness”—which evokes a wonder that this tendril is moving, being moved and actually waving despite the stillness of the surroundings, which gave me the impression that its nature is so delicate that it was moved by some imperceptible ‘force’ in the universe which I take to be line one’s “in search of attachment” … a lovely cycle in this haiku that expresses what I love to look for almost every day!
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Like Harrison, I’m pleased to have learned more this week about how tendrils find something to attach to…
Circumnutation: a movement of the growing portions of a plant to form spirals, irregular curves, or ellipses.
Thigmotropism: In plant biology, a directional growth movement which occurs as a mechanosensory response to a touch stimulus.
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Last, but not least…
“We often don’t notice such dramatic behavior…”
re:Virals is co-hosted by Shawn Blair, Melissa Dennison, Susan Yavaniski, and Keith Evetts (managing editor).
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Received from Vidya Premkumar via the submission form:
“When I read this haiku, I felt an instant connection with the green tendril. Through a psychoanalytic lens, it becomes a reflection of the self, reaching for love, security, or meaning. The “waving in stillness” feels like the suspended moment before contact, the ache of wanting without yet having.
A Buddhist reading turns the meaning inward. “Attachment” is both the vine’s physical need to cling and the mental grasping we are taught to let go of. Even in outer stillness, desire stirs.
Through an ecocritical lens, the tendril is simply itself, part of a living network. Its search mirrors our own instinct to belong. This reminds me that the human urge for connection is not separate from nature’s.
A phenomenological perspective makes me pause on the stillness itself. Without it, the waving might go unnoticed. The haiku suspends me between motion and rest, longing and presence.
In each reading, the tendril changes meaning. Perhaps that is the poem’s gift: a small image that can hold infinite attachments.”