We read haiku often for the power they offer in just a few lines. Whether we’re in a hurry or at leisure, they are HELPFUL, always offering a shift of our thinking and deepening of the moment.

a cold rain starting
and no hat—
so?

Matsuo Basho Poem/ Bachmann Eckenstein Japanese Art

We hadn’t quite realized how they do it until we read Jane Hirschfeld’s wise commentary about the great 17th century poet Basho’s haiku, in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World:

Basho’s poems also instruct in an alternative possibility of being. One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as point toward both world and self. Read this way, haiku remind us that a person should not become too fixed in a singular sense of what the self might consist of or know, or where it might reside.

THAT is what we are always looking for, that haiku helps us find:

instruction in an alternative possibility of being

Here are some:

cool, cool
noon-napping,
feet on a wall

 

…

 

happiness:
waking, alive again,
in this gray world of winter rain

 

…

 

this autumn,
why do I grow old?
a bird entering clouds

We have many books of haiku but our open-anywhere-for-something-just-right favorites are The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa

It got us thinking about the many short poems that, haiku-like, provide instruction:

My Teacher once said to me,
—become one with the knot itself,
Till it dissolves away.
—sweep the garden.
—any size.

—Gary Snyder

…

from Grapefruit by Yoko Ono

Useful.

"Knock. Knock."

You've read your limit of 5 free articles in 30 days.

To continue reading, we invite you to become a Friend with Benefits.

Already a member?