Vintage Berry

nearly sunset

we reel in a salmon

redder than the sky

early to bed

a wild winter night

in the downpipe

snowed in

my frothy cappucino

too hot to drink

in the flames

our old love letters

curled up together

silent rain

i stop to listen

to the lake

spring dawn

pine needles dripping

the night away

collective farm

one of the scarecrows

breaks her back

late afternoon

the porch icicle

lit from within

keeping low sidling along to jenny craig’s

my nick name

engraved on the trunk

out if reach

pausing

at the post

she used to pee on

xmas morning

toys on his windowsill

wrapped in sunrise

clifftop

........ti-tree

.................windshaped

impressive name

for a weed

i look again

taking off her face

after a long day’s work

avon lady

HAIKU - the verbal cartoon

Ernest J Berry

Picton, New Zealand

One thing haiku didn’t do, is further my journalistic career. As a scribe I’d have been paid for words used, whereas now I treasure only unused words.

The shorter message is more easily and quickly digested. Whether it's appliance instructions, road signs, news items, jokes, prayers, cusses, proposals, poetry or senryu; short is sweet and haiku’s a verbal cartoon.

Conversely, I submit, your worship, that the soaring rhetoric of convoluted literary, political or legalistic circumlocution only contrives to anaesthetise consumers consciousness entirely obfuscating simplicity in fuzzy clouds of irrelevant verbosity.

Brevity’s thus economic and vital. Imagine for example 1st aid instructions so voluminous that the patient expires in line 1.

I like concision:

.................go

po...................................

.....Ernest J. Berry

mime

lifting

fog........................................

.....Jerry Kilbride

tundra .....................................................

.....Cor van den Heuval

wet garden

the puppy

brings it in................

.....Ernest J. Berry

wedding night

a satellite

winks.

.....Ernest J. Berry.................

hoar frost

barbed wire blossoms

- author unknown

chinese painter

deciding

on rain...................

.....ai li

titan i

c

e

Ernest J Berry

compare these [for example] to Southard’s famous:

The old rooster crows

Out of the mist come the rocks

And the twisted pine

This sumptuous 17-syllable saga replete with 4 definite articles is undeniably marvellous poetry but great haiku [to me] it is not.

Some of countless economic options could be:

cock crow

out of the mist come rocks

and twisted pine

rocks from mist

and twisted pine

... a rooster crows

first the rooster

then rocks and twisted pine

from the mist

.....etc etc etc

Since we are unable to recall more than a smidgin of all our verbal and written input, its vital that the essential image be unadorned and uncluttered. Of the myriad articles I've read, written & digested about haiku, all i can bring to mind at this moment are the following:

wildflowers

not one good enough

to pluck

.... Ernest J Berry

Of the myriad words I've read & heard about haiku, all I can recall at this moment are the following snippets [paraphrased]...

write at least one haiku per day.......John O'Conner

read read and re-read classic haiku...Harold G. Henderson

make haiku habitual........................Janice Bostok

live and look for haiku everywhere....Janice Bostok

wordless poem..............................Eric Amman

art of the unsaid............................anon