PACE Global Haiku • January 2009
Dr. Randy Brooks

snow            
    winter
                        moonlight

by
Eris Eridamus

Haiku should be short, simple verse. It should allow the reader to enter into a real or imagined experience. It should connect to the past, or transcend the present. The past can be what we have learned from the masters of haiku or personal experiences. Haiku will resonate with a distinct clear ring. It can cause you to ponder, laugh, remember or feel sorrows, imagine, and above all ~ feel.

Haiku is to be experienced by the writer and the reader. Haiku is to be shared and to start conversations. It can join us together in soothing remembrances or imagined distant lands of the past. The writing of haiku causes us to notice and to be more aware. It heightens our senses and causes us to perfect the art. It leaves room for every one’s individual experiences. In our personal writings, there is no right or wrong. The haiku notebooks, that we fill, leave a trail of observances and experiences that have helped us become more intrinsically and extrinsically aware.

Some of my favorite things are the snow, the winter, and the moonlight. Reading and writing haiku has become one of them as well.

midnight in the country
snow brushes across the road
i should go home

dancing fairies
darting from tree to tree
~ twirling snow

a single leaf
tumbling like an acrobat
on the sidewalk

snowbird sleeps
covered in down
snuggles in deeply

neglect
i am so used to it
it doesn’t feel bad anymore

moss covered steps
jasmine spilling over
aged stone walls

sea of rhododendrons
sheltered under aging willows
ferns line the path

fog

One day this winter, my son and I went for a walk in the park. It was 50 some degrees out. It had been too long, since I had been able to take a long walk outside. There was no snow on the ground. The weather had just been so cold for a really long time. That afternoon, the path along the lake and the park was blanketed in fog. I had never walked in the fog before. It would swirl around us. You would walk into an area that was so dense to find a clearing inside of it. As you turned, in all directions, the dense fog remained. It was as if it was a completely misty white covering. At the ground, the fog curls and moves slowly. Trees appeared as looming figures in the distance. I would have to get really close to them to recognize that they were ‘just’ trees. I would remember what they had looked liked before in the autumn and summer. My son thought that the fog ‘crossing’ the road looked like the ancient kings crossing the moors. As we walked further, for about an hour, I noticed that mist had collected on our clothes and hair. It made it seem tangible, like we had been participants in the fog.

cold foggy afternoon
walk in the park
mist drips from my hair