Introduction -
Why haiku? The answer is simple: haiku is a Japanese form of poetry that is amazing in that it can be used to portray the unseen, to point out an irony or to colorfully depict a scene usually in just 17 syllables or in just three lines with 5-7-5 syllables.
Haiku is always about more than what is given on the page. It captures a feeling, a moment, an attitude towards nature, towards life, towards being. At its best, haiku transcends the words on the page and communicates something elusive.
Poet Sonia Sanchez had the following to say about the beauty and power of haiku:
“This haiku, this tough form disguised in beauty and insight is like the blues, for they both offer no solutions, only a pronouncement, a formal declaration—acceptance of pain and humor, beauty and non-beauty, death and rebirth, surprise and life. Always life.”
If you pay close attention to the silence, the pauses in each haiku, there may be an “aha moment.” That is yours to claim.
As in life, so it is in love. Love has its cycles of death and of rebirth. Love has its seasons—seasons of longing, of passion, of maturity and of loss. In nature we see symmetry to life and love. Some of the haiku and other poetry here are a reflection on life and on love as seen in nature.
I chose haiku because they are a powerful and concise way to express an emotion, an idea. Although haiku is a rigid form with specific rules, haiku is also flexible, with rules that can be adapted. For instance, even the great Japanese haiku masters wrote and published haiku that were a syllable or two more or less than 17. And like so many of my predecessors, I reinvent the form to tell a story with long and short haiku.
You will find short poems as well as short essays here in addition to the haiku. The short poems vary in subject matter from love, to nature, to politics.
It is always interesting for me to learn more about a writer, especially a poet, once I have read his or her or work. In that spirit, I am also including a few short essays composed from journals I kept while spending an extended period of time in Romania, Spain and Ghana. I would like to share these with you because my travels have so fundamentally shaped who I am and how I see the world. They have had an impact on my poetry in more ways than one. The stories I tell are too short to publish as a stand-alone book, so I thought it a fitting little surprise to include them here.
