Legend of the Lost

[pjthompson]

I was cleaning a filing cabinet and found some wonders, but mostly non-wonders. I found a file of old, lost poetry. For the most part, it should have stayed lost. I'll make an e-file of juvenilia, but I doubt most of the stuff there will see the light of day. Some of it was okay. For instance, I found a file of old haiku, tanka, and cinquains I'd written for a writing exercise in a writing class. It was all about condensing images. Some of those weren't too bad.

Technically, haiku is seventeen syllables in three lines divided 5, 7, 5—but I didn't always adhere to that and many Western haiku writers don't follow that pattern, it seems. Tanka are 31 syllables, five lines, divided 5, 7, 5, 7, 7; cinquain are 22 syllables, five lines, divided 2, 4, 6, 8, 2.

Haiku

White branches swaying
against a stormy sky:
bones in a riverbed

A green field and far
across it a cry—is it
dog or is it bird?

Summer evening,
honeysuckle, jasmine, and
a sky vast and dark.

Rain in bougainvillea,
voices murmuring.
What is it that they say?

Idol in the garden,
your niche is sifted over
with decay of leaves.

Tanka

In a dead woman’s
room everything is still and
silent as if here
her presence is need to
keep this world of things moving.

Cinquain

The birds
in the distance
hovering quite still I
saw after all were just a flock
of kites.

Woman
walking in the
rain I thought I knew, but
it cannot be unless she was
a ghost.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

These are fragrant and bright-dark. I love the haiku sequence, especially the rain in the bougainvillea, and I love the cinquain about the kites.

[pjthompson]

Thank you. I remember each moment, but it almost seems as if someone else wrote them after all this time.

[kmkibble75.livejournal.com]

Man, that's a lot of rules for something that's supposed to be as free as poetry.

[pjthompson]

Poetry started out free, then went through a long period with a lot of rules before freeing up again. Some would say it still has a lot of rules, even the free verse. :-)