Heather Aymer • Heather's Haiku •

In discussing the haiku of Penny Harter, one must venture from traditional human views of our superiority to the known worlds. We must remember the lividity of all things around us, that a rock will mourn from a murder years after blood spilt on it. This personification, this communion Harter determines exists, and, to know the beauty of which she speaks and notes and writes, this must be attained by our egocentric minds, or we lose. I start with her mention of us in her haiku collection titled Monkey’s Face. fingering the bones around the soft spot— the newborn’s head This haiku is simple for it speaks of human fragility, that we are not invincible gods stepping over the earth. We have three plates in our head that are not fused until long after our birth. We are so dependent on our own human beings to keep up existing. So fragile. Many of us do dare to notice this, what we may consider, irony in our children, instead of noticing it, for it is too, ourselves. I consider I feel in this moment the wonder of fragility, that this can be an epiphany in the learning of a human, a step in life that needs to occur to understand the simple truth of ourselves, that continuing to live is often set on chance and plenty of protection. Life is a simple spark that nature determines, or not, to grow out. climbing the hill from grave to grave losing face This is about our mortality, the spaces of graves in the haiku the same of that in a conventional cemetery. Is this climber "losing face," crying, because of the mourning of a death, which many would feel? Perhaps with the hundreds of graves being passed, does the walker lose their personal significance of all lives past lived? My first reaction is who is the climber looking for and do they begin to cry in having found this person, having not known previously of their passing. How grave? These two haiku are centered on aspects of humanity; we can easily juxtapose the beginning and the end of a human life. The serenity and the wonder of birth with the emotions and difficulty of letting a person, an identity of a significant part of our lives grow beyond our grasp. Harter makes it simple. Bones tell us of beginning while piles of stone and tears of person give us heart to see an end of one life amidst that of the many others that have come and that will come. There is not only one human on this earth that grieves for the passing or joys for the birth of another. We all do and always will. I think that Harter is making universal these emotions. Harter, in beginning to meld humanity with the rest of our world, writes this haiku from Deep in the Pine. beekeeper humming back The bees and the beekeeper talk to one another. The bees live their lives, producing honey, reproducing and dying, as the beekeeper does nearly the same extracting honey, reproducing, perhaps, and definitely dying. I love here how the beekeeper hums the communion here of the souls at work. One can feel the thrumming peace through the bodies of all, that there is a plane close by that the rest of us can jump onto and understand. And, these thoughts and feelings are discovered by Harter, putting them in a succession of three simple words. Harter’s brevity in her haiku, I have noticed, graces most of my personal favorites, such as the following. grass punctures the blacktop She is brief here, but her word choice is astounding and produces the effect that the grass is simply trying to claim back the ground of which we annexed to put our tar. The grass is personified as in war, being vile, making blood ooze. But, it is fighting a war, and all is in war. I do not particularly think this is what Harter herself was thinking, war and all, but I do see her having the grass act like a human for us, we humans, to understand what we did when laying that tar, and, the ground was just as dandy without it. Also, however, is the versatility of the grass, that nature is so much stronger than any fabrication laid down upon it by human hands, because it is coming back. Some would find the grass growing back ironic. In Harter’s poetry in her collection Stages and Views, I found nature being as we are, making decisions for the day, escaping, relaxing, feeling, as I feel Harter believes that would should. A few excerpts. 4. Kanagawa (1) Like plumes of morning smoke trees cluster between inns some nodding toward the street some the bay. Decisions, as what direction to look on today as would people rising first in the morning, standing outside about the inn wondering in which direction to afford their days efforts, the trees giving them choices. 45. Ishiyakuski (4) All the villages trees bow to one another. What dignity and politeness the trees have for their fellows, as should we. 24. Shimada (4) The sun is hot. From the hills above the beach two pines bend over a few teal boulders in the sand. Compassion for fellow inhabitants of the world. 44. Yokkaichi (2) a rolling straw hat takes off down the path strings flying Escape from bondage to doing another’s bidding, to simply run free. I mention these because they give example to Harter’ s ability to use personification in depicting what humans should do or what humans do feel and, also, in what nature feels in accord to how we treat it. We do not bow to the trees as we pass them, but wonder what kind of houses they would make. We do not understand that our straw hat would rather be straw and grow in a field than sit atop our head and swelter in the sun without water or relief. Trees look to what to do today, as they glance at the bay as we do, wanting to participate in our conversation and wondering through our lives. We do not five shelter from the son to beach or the rocks, have no compassion to our humans friends as the trees do to everything else. The remainder of verses in Stages and Views depict humans doing their daily activities with verses such as they poignantly placed in between, such as this. 18. Okitsu (2) Legs buckling, porters carry a sumo wrestler across. He looks down as the litter sags. The sumo wrestler has only the compunction to be annoyed as the litter sags going across the river. He does not consider how his weight is burdensome and nearly impossible to carry, that this cultural custom is ridiculous and unkind. A tree would do no such thing. Harter is telling us in these verses that we need to keep an eye toward nature to find, again, what we are and, that our consideration of ourselves and "human" has only made us more sinister and less caring to the rest of our world and each other. Stages and Views, aside from these poetic verses, said by Harter to be written in the way of haiku, does contain haiku within that complements the traveling verses. In these, Harter further demonstrates our distance from ourselves and our world. reaching for the moon the child’s fingers smudge the window pane A barrier, the smudged window, disallows the child from reaching as for as it wishes toward the moon. The window could represent any adult in the child’s life that may be hindering this child’s dreams and creativity and sheer wonder of life, and, I would venture, Harter contends that many of us, old or young, feel so constrained or have not yet broken the window pane, or just simply opened the window. It is such a simple thing. in the graveyard the mourner’s slap at mosquitoes Interesting how we can mourn for "one of our own," and blatantly kill another in the very same moment. This simple insight puts Harter beyond many of us, stomping on the bug that bit our dog. Along with our lack of serenity with our natural world, Harter seems to point that, perhaps, our inability to discern the passage of time beyond each of our separate human lives also inhibits us from such. And, in furthering that thought, we miss wisdom peaking at us from the mountain top. mountain walking stick worn smooth This walker is in harmony, often trekking to the mountains side to have a talk or just to be in silent harmony, so noted by the walking stick pleasantly worn by a gently hand from those moments over many years. How many such adventurers has the mountain had for company over the long, long years of its life, and how joyous is it to find someone that wishes to spend time with him? by the sea the child fills his pail with the smoothest stones A child questing for the smoothest stones thrown to the shore by the sea. Here, Harter contrasts between youth and old, for smooth stones take many years, beyond what I will say, in order to be just so smooth. It is somewhat ironic that the child goes for the oldest of stones and that, metaphorically, may be looking for time and wisdom. In summation, I would say that Harter is always imploring us to notice. It is a simple moment had during the course of her life that she simply writes, but she wants us, too, to see what she learned in that moment, similar to the haiku of Zen masters, only writing few in their lives and only at times of discovery. Her discovery and that which she teaches is we are nature as much as the nature that we call so and need to learn from and within it. Her haiku simply implore this to the rest of us. —Heather Aymer