Editors Choice Haiku
WHE Autumn 2020
EDITOR’S CHOICE HAIKU
In this issue I am going to do something unusual in the Editor’s Choice column. Instead
of picking a single haiku from among many as is done normally, I wish to take up all the best three haiku and seven honourable mentions from the Vanguard Haiku section which happens to have ended up in comprising only haiku about COVID-19. The pandemic is such a momentous event in the whole history of humanity that it is perfectly opportune
for us to make the Vanguard Haiku section a special feature on it. For this reason, I also increased the number of entry for the Zatsuei significantly.
We have had so many good submissions on this topic that there emerged more than 30 poems (normally between 11 and 15) in the first selection which were chosen as the candidates for the best ten. It became a difficult job for me to whittle them down to 10.
The following Editor’s Choice is based on some of the numerous thoughts which passed through my mind in this agonising but well-worth process:
*
COVID-19 kills. Death is 20% of its end. The remaining 80% fill us with fear of and for
it. The fear or a sense of foreboding is triggered by being made to be alone and forgotten, something we have tried to avoid since we were cave men.
isolation
one day closer to the day
no one will remember me
Barbara Tate (First Place)
Self and community (i.e. a couple, family, household, neighbours, friends, village/town/city/county, region, nation…entire world etc.) and their relationship or interaction are one of the most basic conditions of our existence. Can the self retain any existential meaning at all without community (e.g. complete hermit, perfect misanthrope or a 100% unknown artist or novelist), which is the next dreadful question we are confronted with, after the question about God or gods?
Most of us are mentally healthy (or timid) enough not to wish to reject community entirely. However, few of us are strong enough to be free from the fear of isolation. The lockdown has proved, as if a proof is needed, that this fear of ours is much stronger than we thought.
Barbara Tate probably represent a great majority of us. Her sensibility makes the feeling keener. To die is bad enough unless we have a death wish. To die without loved ones present is a sheer tragedy. Furthermore, to die and not remembered by anyone must be the ultimate loneliness, even though we die alone anyway. It could invoke the question
that we might as well not to have been born, which is a travesty of the sanctity of life,
belief in love that creates life, and all the good things in this world of ours. A mundane sentiment about a pedestrian feeling expressed in a brutally honest manner in this haiku has reached the dark profundity of human despair.
coronavirus -
he strives himself to prove of God
that he exists
Dan Iulian (Second Place)
This haiku poses ‘the’ big question – a forbidden one, the taboo for a long time. A catastrophic event like COVID-19 inevitably evokes an urge to ask the most fundamental questions. Many say that COVID-19 has happened for God or gods to punish our sins. Others use it as yet another proof that He or gods did not, or could not, prevent it from happening to save us. Still others feel that God or gods categorically have nothing to do with it. We are in a mental and emotional wasteland under COVIS-19 not only because of its voracious appetite to infect but also because we don’t know much about it. Fear of the unknown is liable to lead to blind belief in super-human or supernatural forces. Neither science nor the government is guarantee of reassurance or remedy.
Dan Iulian is more nuanced and delicate. We don’t know who this ‘he’ is in line 2 (I have advocated strongly that pronouns should be avoided in haiku, except ‘I’ and when it is obvious whom a particular pronoun is referring to). More difficult to decipher is line 3 where there is a double entendre. ‘He’ can be the same person as the one in line 2, or ‘he’ can be the god, even if it is not written as ‘He’, which is a convenient feature of haiku tending to be written in small letters. So, one interpretation could be that there is a man (perhaps the author himself) who is trying hard to say to God that he (the man) is still
alive and that he wishes to be saved from the ravages of the virus.
The more controversial but common interpretation would be that the person in the haiku finds his belief in God shaken in the face of COVID-19 and is struggling to fight off the lingering doubt that He does not exist after all if He allows such disaster to humanity as COVID-19 to happen and does not do anything at all to save us from the infection and/or death or serious cases emanating from it, or even to help our doctors, nurses, care workers or academics, and indeed all our citizens who are desperately fighting against the virus. From the haiku I hear painful and pitiful voices saying, ‘Where are you?’, ‘Why and how could you forsake us?’
This desperate cry is beautifully and subtly related by Albert Camus in an almost imperceptible change which occurs within the priest who first oppressively and agrily chides the citizens for their sins causing the plague but gradually realises that his condemnation is wrongly directed.
sheltering in place
I learn how much of me
is an introvert
Claire Vogel Camargo
COVID-19 is revealing all sorts of truths about humanity, or at least telling us more
clearly and accurately what we have already known. We are of everything. We are both extravert and introvert in the same person. The difference is only the degree to which we are one thing or the other at any given time and in any particular circumstance. People are taken by surprise when a gentle and mild man kills. The truth is that he is capable of being evil as well as good. It all depends. Thus we hold within ourselves all potential possibilities (see Editorial of this issue). The question is how to create and sustain those conditions which give rise to good and avoid those which create evil.
Quite how the author of this haiku feels about what she has found out of the sheltering is not clear. Is she glad, unhappy, or just surprised? COVID-19 isolation is causing in us all sorts of emotions and reactions. Loneliness is the most talked about as we are a social animal. Many people suffer from mental issues too. However, some cannot help ‘enjoying’ this unexpected or unprecedented quandary, perhaps secretly, as they have been finding human relationship stressful, troublesome, or even insufferable and wishing to do without it. The virus has given them a golden opportunity to enjoy the glorious isolation without having to feel guilty or to present justification or excuses to anyone.
sequestered
I cultivate the seeds
of loneliness
Debbie Strange
This is an interesting way of handling loneliness caused by the pandemic. All the secrets are contained in line 2. The interpretation of the words ‘cultivate’ and ‘seeds’ decides the author’s response. She is not yet suffering from the fully-blown loneliness but clearly expecting it is coming. In that case, it would certainly be better to ‘grow’ it in the way she likes or tolerate, rather than leaving it to grow by itself out of her control, making her life an utter misery. There is ‘good’ loneliness and ‘bad’ loneliness. The word ‘cultivate’ seems to me to be giving such implications.
mice, men scurrying
to what they hope is an exit
amazing race
Vic Fleming
COVID-19 has caught us unawares. Once realising what is happening, we have regrettably always got far behind because of the incredible speed and ease with which the infection
has spread across the world. In its wake the virus has left us in total chaos. In that confusion we all yearn for a way-out and make a dash for it. Vic Fleming is observing all this in a detached way and with a hint of sense of irony and humour. If the exit turns out to be a death-trap the humour will turn black and we will all be lemmings jumping off cliffs.
mass grave...
social distance no longer
required
Ed Bremson
Watching on TV acres and acres of mass graves dug anew makes us shudder. The apocalyptic scene gives an illusion that it is not the death of each individuals but that of human kind. It is an endless and fathomless fear hidden deeply in our psyche for big events on a par with the likes of the end of the world or the death of our planet. Social distancing is one of the desperate but surprisingly effective tools we humans have been just able to come up with in the face of this formidable enemy. It is all about our wish to live. Mass grave is a cruel symbol of the reality denying that wish in one fell swoop.
summer staycation
exploring my hometown
like a tourist
Michael Dudley
Many new words and phrases have popped out from the siege of COVID-19 and have become part of the ‘new norm’ to the chagrin of the linguistic fundamentalists.
‘Staycation’ is an especially ugly word but in fact does its job well in the sense that we
know immediately what it means. It has got a sense of irony because ‘vacation’ is to
vacate schools, work places and home for regular closure and therefore you literally
have to leave them physically and not to stay there. As the haiku says eloquently we are doing the magic of staying and vacating at the same time. This ridiculous contradiction shows up what sort of serious confusion the pandemic has pushed us into. ‘Hometown’ implies that you know everything you ought to know about it. However, more often than not there are many things we don’t really know about our own place, region or country, and most tellingly about ourselves.
distance
I step a meter away
from the mirror
Radka Mindova
One of the seriousness-cum-absurdity aspects of COVIS-19 is how to set the social distancing rules: 2 metres apart, 6 feet (i.e. 1.8288 metres), 1 metre or 1 metre plus etc. There is no exact scientific co-relation. The effect changes if you are facing each other, sitting side by side or looking at the opposite directions. It is based on the estimated distance one’s droplets reach, which can be as long as 10 metres according to some study. It has disregarded tiny and light aerosols which travels a long way or float around in the
air for a very, very long time. The haiku is a tease and mockery about this stupidity, or a depiction of how jumpy we have become. However, social distancing, though not exact science, does work and has worked fantastically. To be masked or not to be masked, that
is the question, and is another absurdity which we can ignore at our peril. The one absurdity which has never been talked about, even by top scientists and medical experts,
is ugai (gargling and cleansing with salted or medicated water to wash mouth and throat clear of germs, bacteria and viruses) which is most possibly as important as regular hand washing, and which may well have contributed to the relatively low level of COVID-19 infection and death in Japan. Haiku poets of the world, do the ugai.
staring out the window . . .
the last days of Shiki
come to mind
Don Baird
During the last part of his relatively short life (34 years and 5 days), Masaoka Shiki was bed-ridden and confined in a room. However, he was eager to see the garden and composed many haiku about the plants and flowers he observed and painted
watercolours as well. We are all influenced by Shiki because he, as the father of modern haiku, is always teaching us, albeit indirectly. When we ourselves get isolated, we seem to appreciate his predicament more personally.
2 metre rule
I step aside
for someone's shadow
David Jacobs
Another haiku about social distancing. This time the author is so uptight about the rule that he kept the distance even from the shadow of someone. A humorous haiku but deadly serious. It is the government’s regulation but in truth the fear of contagion and of death
is making people obey. The ‘shadow’ conjures up the image of the shadow of death. So, in a way the author is trying to step away from the possibility of being killed by the virus. We are all frightened by shadows in one form or another.