A few months into the pandemic, at about the point we realized we were in it for the long haul, my dad had the idea that we should write haikus to each other every week. This, I thought, was a brilliant idea. I'd been trying to put words to both the grief and goodness brought on by the pandemic, but I was coming up short. Not for lack of thoughts or words, mind you, but because there were too many. They were unruly and evasive. I couldn't pin them down.
Enter the haiku. The lovely and infuriating thing about a haiku is the restraint it takes to write one. You only have 17 syllables and three lines to work with. You have to make each one count.
Not that I'm an expert, but I have learned that to write a haiku the first thing you have to do is observe the world around you--take in the big picture, make note of the minutia, and pay attention to how you respond.
Then you have to identify a particular image, something that some how captures what you've observed and how you've experienced it. It could be an old man shuffling slump-shouldered around the block with his dog trailing behind, or your son's delight as he coasts down a grassy hill, steady on his bike for the first time.
Then you have to distill that down into your meager allotment of syllables, choosing every word thoughtfully, carefully. It can be slow-going, like a lapidarist shaping a gemstone--sanding away all that is unnecessary, pressing the remaining piece against the grindstone, polishing it until each facet is revealed.
But it's worth the effort, because what you get is a solid, compact, and beautiful piece of writing, reflecting and refracting the stories within the poem as you turn it this way and that.
Now, I'm not saying my haikus are anything like that. I'm a novice as far as this goes, and a clumsy one at that. In fact, I only ended up writing a handful of them. But they do reflect bits and pieces of my experience over the course of the pandemic so far. And together they create a multifaceted whole, refracting images of grief and joy, weariness and strength, reflecting a kaleidoscope of experience.
I'd like to share them and look at them a little more closely over the next few weeks. And as you join me, maybe they'll illuminate something in your own experience, and we'll be able to see the whole spectrum of Light shining through.
Yorumlar