Global Haiku • Spring 2016
Dr. Randy Brooks

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BenjaminBrawner
Benjamin Brawner

Reader Response Essay:
Cor van den Heuvel's Haiku on “Boys” and “Nature”

Sneer, Shift, and Sway:
A Simple Haiku Transformation

by
Benjamin Noah Brawner

Haiku did not come to me easily. No cunning twist, word play, or crude humor was going to give me a quick fix into finding a voice in short poetry. It wasn’t until I began to focus on the simple observations and meditations of the Zen poets that I started to understand what haiku really meant to me. Haiku is understanding a moment so intimately that your response can be spoken on a single breath. What a twist I discovered, that crude humor can easily belong in haiku; it simply must come from a place of honesty.

 


that face
speaks novels
and nothing at all
        . . . women


morningstar
a dry cough
startles the cock


spring drizzle
a rain coat
lifts its thumb


band practice
calloused hands
can’t play the notes


salmon lips
for them
I swim upstream


beach day
the speckled salt
I carry with me


skinny white boy
crooning Louis Armstrong
uncomfortable silence

 


cigarette burns
a drunken reminder
to stop smoking


a white shirt
stained red
with pomegranate


pitch black
bare feet across snow
hauling the night’s wood


a snail
sheds its shell
silly slug


reading Whitman
aloud
strumming a guitar


my hand reaches
toward the glowing mass
little bro runs away

 


skinny priest
kneels down
praying mantis


midnight rider
around the block
fussy baby


© 2016, Randy Brooks • Millikin University
All rights returned to authors upon publication.