Tuesday, March 28, 2006

First and last haiku

This was the one and only haiku I ever wrote, when I was twelve.

The frosty wind bites
The trees are covered with snow
Beggars die of cold

Beneath it, I drew, in coloured pencils on lined paper, a bare, snow-laden tree in the middle of a snow storm. A man in rags sits propped up against the tree hugging his knees, but he faces the other direction so you cannot see his face. I never really thought about whether I was drawing a dead man or not.

Frankly, I never saw what all the fuss was about haikus in English. If you ask me, even so-called well-written haikus don't sound right in English because the dynamics of the language just don't allow for the same kind of beauty that this poetic structure may bring out in Japanese.

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