Two winter haiku

[vaneramos]

i.

geese streak silent dusk
pursuit of starlit fields
under folded wings

ii.

truck rounds icy street
sunlight angled low grazes
smooth cheek in the cab

Comments

[ghostsandrobots.livejournal.com]

Very nice. First one especially resonates with me.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks, those streaks of geese have been flying around in my head for several days. I had to commit them to poetry.

[missprune.livejournal.com]

haikus (haikai?) and photographs are so much alike, aren't they?

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Haiku by definition are comprised of concrete images. In such an immediate form they are indeed like photographs.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

These are both beautiful. The second one tickles me because it's not the kind of subject I normally associate with haiku (although I don't know why not).

May I pick a nit? Is the second line of the first one supposed to start "in pursuit"?

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

No. A haiku is by definition comprised of sentence fragments. There are many rules, and a writer must pick and choose. But one of the most important is to avoid a single run-on sentence. There is supposed to be a syntactical break at the end of the first or second line. In both of these I placed it at the end of the first. Still, your nit demonstrates that the division is not as clear as it should be, perhaps.

The truck is an unusual element, but the image pointed toward traditional themes of haiku, so I decided to experiment.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

My supposition was based not on grammatical considerations, but rather on my impression, perhaps incorrect, that the second line was supposed to contain 7 syllables, or at least that the whole thing should contain 17.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

As a general guideline, yes, although a lesson I read on tanka said Chinese syllables are shorter than English ones, so it may be appropriate to use less than 17. I chose to count "field" as two syllables.