.
jingling cry for peace
a poet’s soul flickers
the spring lights
Masumi Orihara
Standing here
dazzled by new green leaves –
the road to the shrine
Masahiro Nakagawa
Graceful heron looks
Past his own still reflection
Finds the fish beneath
Seth T. Tolbert
redcurrant jelly
shoots from the spoon
summer days
Joanna M. Weston
The ground, infinite
with infants
following ants
Keiko Yurugi
.
The Onion Field …………………………………………. by Dimitar Anakiev
.
If you happen to be walking in the northern part of Kyoto, known as Kitayama, you may notice near the Botanical Gardens a middle-aged man watching over an onion field located right beside his house. His name is Branko Manojlovic, a Serbian poet who has been living in Kyoto for quite some time now. Although the onion is an essential part of Serbian culture – I can’t recall a dish that has no onions in it – these were planted not by Branko but by a nameless neighbour. Two years have already passed since the planting, yet the onion is still unharvested.
I, too, was taken with this field. During my stay in Branko’s house, I watched it every day from the window of my room: a field that through its very existence seemed to hint at something that, although not obvious, was at the same time significant.
Looking out of the window – the onion field still wet after rain – I wrote a haiku:
In its second year
onion languishing – who will
come and harvest it?
At breakfast, Branko looked moody and with dark bags under his eyes from lack of sleep. As I was stirring my tea with a questioning expression he swigged his coffee in a hurry and, before going off to work, handed me a folded piece of paper: “Last night’s haiku”, he said. After he left I opened the paper, it read:
Unable to get back
to sleep… the onion field
lashed by storm
I noticed that Branko had a special relationship with the onion field, but we did not discuss it. One afternoon I noticed him pacing about the field as though looking over each stem, each green leaf that was pointing toward the sky. The following morning, I got another piece of paper that read:
A group photograph:
we are the onions
hanging under eaves
I myself wrote haiku on the subject of onions, which seemed to have dominated our thoughts and emotions. On the other side of the street, where the bus no. 4 was passing, I noticed a small Shinto shrine set there perhaps because of some superstitious belief. Like some Christian chapels, such shrines would often have been established by local people, and this particular one was leaning against a neighbour’s house.
When I was leaving Kyoto, I left Branko this haiku:
In Kitayama
the onion field watched over
by some Shinto god
I do not know if this field still exists today. If by chance it does, I’ll bet Branko is keeping an eye on it.
Onions …………………………………………………………. by Branko
.
Out of snow
green tails of onion stalks
slicing the wind
*
How past repair
this aging onion field…
how the umbels
still hold on for bees
and swooping swallows!
*
By the field’s edge
he glances left and right,
uproots an onion,
stuffs it in the plastic bag
together with his conscience
How odd that we who aspire to or pride ourselves on our knowledge, wisdom, originality and insight find that simplest and most universal of phenomena, mortality, so difficult to come to terms with.
We deal with it like a sudden exorbitant bill that arrived in the mail – a bill, no less, for utilities we have made lavish use of. It is there on the table. We knew it would come some day. Yet it still doesn’t seem fair. We wish we had never even seen or touched it, let alone opened it.
Or is this simile trite? Isn’t death more like fire: another natural phenomenon, familiar, intrinsic and essential, that is nevertheless apart, ineffable, unpredictable and fearful? That leaps from where it was softly glowing – a little dinnertable flame. Knocked over, it is a writhing snake in your lap in the time it takes you to blink. Venom without antidote. Even the most levelheaded of us leap back with boomerang eyebrows.
Circumstances, both my own and others’, are such that death has been smoldering in my mind for the past few weeks, and appearing in warm conversations.
Things that could be
better we speak of as
things that just are
Things that may lead
to death we speak of as
part of our lives
Round the table
we share the good, the bad
as music plays
In spite of my Icebox truancy, Tito kindly invited me to take part in a meeting in Ueno, almost two weeks ago, of the Meguro International Haiku Circle. And then, in spite of my arriving late, the poets kindly asked me to contribute some of my haiku.
Here are the three I read out, composed last month on a trip to Chiang Rai, Thailand.
Gold pagoda
Roofs outreached by limbs of
A yellow tree
Not a Buddha
But a man, arms folded
At a bus stop
I played ball with
The children, and parting
Was no sorrow
Then, nearing home that evening, inspired by the poetry I’d heard and the acquaintances I’d made, the following came to me while walking by the river
Dark Sumida
From where these loud slaps on
The rolling hull?
white butterfly
on a dandelion –
praying hands
Joanna M. Weston
****************
at the well
between letting the stone go
and splash
Diarmuid Fitzgerald
***************
summer ending
the quiet face of the moon
at sunset
Duro Jaiye
***************
.
… Glittering crystal beads
… Decorate my body —
… Humid afternoon
… Beads of sweat
… Twinkle on my ears —
… Unlooked-for jewels
