The Hairbag Poet-“Can of Hope”

Hi and welcome to my Friday series The Hairbag Poet.

You can read about the history of this series here.

In the blogger world Fridays are known as Poetry Friday. You can read about Poetry Friday here.

Todays poem is a Haiku. I have to say I’ve never really been a big fan of the Haiku, but being the Hairbag poet that I am, I must confess I never really understood the Haiku. Like most areas of my life when I don’t understand something, I research it.

Haiku (hokku), is a form of Japanese verse.

According to Poetry Foundation (2017) “A haiku often features an image, or a pair of images, meant to depict the essence of a specific moment in time. Not popularized in Western literature until the early 1900s, the form originates from the Japanese hokku, or the opening section of a longer renga sequence. In this context, the hokku served to begin a longer poem by establishing a season, often with a pair of seasonal images. Unlike the rest of the renga sequence, which was composed collaboratively, the hokku was often created by a single poet working alone, and was subsequently used as an exercise for students. Over time, the hokku began to be appreciated for its own worth and became distinct as a poetic form, formally mastered by poets such as Basho and Yosa Buson.”

I believe my Haiku below captures both the requirement of image and season capturing the specific moment in time that we have all come to know as the bomb cyclone.

“Despite its formal history, the haiku’s composition has expanded somewhat over time. This is due in part to the differences between the Japanese language and Western languages. In its original Japanese form, the haiku is often divided into 17 mora (a Japanese unit of syllable weight) and arranged in a single vertical line. However, in English there is no exact equivalent to the mora unit. As a result, in English and other languages, haikus are most frequently adapted into three lines of verse, usually unrhymed, composed of five, seven, and five syllables, adding up to seventeen syllables total” (Poetry Foundation, 2017).

I hope you enjoy these posts. Thanks for stopping by and reading, and please feel free to post your own poetry in the comments if you feel inspired by the photographs. I always love reading other peoples perspective on “art”.

The Hairbag Poet