Washington DC related haiku
Apr. 8th, 2011 10:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
untonugganI've been playing around with haiku and other forms of Japanese short form poetry lately. I recently got a book that I found really helpful in explaining what haikus are besides "nature poems with 5-7-5 syllables." (For instance, the author argues that due to differences in the Japanese and English languages we should focus on writing short-long-short line haikus with less than 17 syllables. It's very liberating.)
I wrote one haiku before reading her book that I'm fond of, but is not very...traditional. I also realized after reading it that it probably only makes sense if you are familiar with the cherry blossoms in Washington DC, which were given to the US by Japan as a friendship pact starting in 1910/1912. However, many of them (and a 400 year old lantern) were given after World War II after the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
With that background, I hope this haiku (in remembrance of recent events in Japan) makes sense.
the bomb's friendship pact
erupts in pink and white blooms
tsunamis are black
I wrote one haiku before reading her book that I'm fond of, but is not very...traditional. I also realized after reading it that it probably only makes sense if you are familiar with the cherry blossoms in Washington DC, which were given to the US by Japan as a friendship pact starting in 1910/1912. However, many of them (and a 400 year old lantern) were given after World War II after the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
With that background, I hope this haiku (in remembrance of recent events in Japan) makes sense.
the bomb's friendship pact
erupts in pink and white blooms
tsunamis are black
