Editor's Choice, May 2008

WORLD HAIKU REVIEW Volume 6 Issue 3 - May 2008

EDITOR'S CHOICE

In this issue I have chosen a haiku which is one of the best war haiku I have ever read:

about the war...

mother simply stares

into her soup

Irene Golas, Canada

Irene comes from a Polish family who immigrated to Canada. To them World War Two would never be a distant past. Their life in the adopted country may have been different and better but still would not be such that would eradicate evil memories. Irene wanted to know what her mother had to endure in Europe and to understand all these human atrocities against other humans, which seem to be endless. Her parents’ generation mostly want to obliterate such memories and to keep their children protected from them. Hence, the silence.

From other haiku by Irene published in the Neo-classical section of this issue of WHR, one knows that Irene too is getting to the age of her parents when they fled to freedom and that they were now needing care. Humans have enough problems of old age and eventual death without bothering to kill each other. Can this cycle of folly and inhumanity be broken? Or is this the best we can do as compared with animals who really have to kill each other for survival? Do we have to be reduced to this insanity? Have music and art or good literature and other forms of high culture no meaning after all, faced with the reality of human savagery and cruelty?

Irene’s mother was now in the condition whereby they could no longer have normal conversations. Nevertheless, I would guess she tried to have normal conversations with her. This makes her haiku doubly poignant.

By depicting a powerless person, incapacitated, vulnerable and helpless, who was refusing to talk about war, this haiku became a very powerful poem protesting against war and any other violence. The power of silence here is just incredible.