My Ten Haiku, March 2009

World Haiku Review, Volume 7, Issue 1, March 2009

My Ten Haiku March 2009

My Ten Haiku

Introduction

The World Haiku Club has endeavoured to celebrate and demonstrate haiku poems of quality, newness and originality.

In this new series we ask poets to select by themselves, say, 20 haiku from among the numerous haiku poems which they have written all through their haiku life and which, without false modesty or show-off, they feel confident, happy and genuinely proud in the sense that they represent what they want to say in haiku and reflect what they believe to be the essence of haiku. We will narrow these 20 to 10.

It is hoped that these stringently selected ten will represent something by which the authors can be judged critically and emulated.

Poets are selected not according to the length of their haiku life, 'position' or fame in the world haiku community or even the number of their publications, but purely and simply according to the quality and merits of their poems. They are presented in alphabetical order. In this issue, the featured poet is Carole MacRury.

My Ten Haiku by

Carole MacRury, USA

heat wave

the horse blinks away

a gnat’s life

drought –

weeds sprout

under the sprinkler

lilac in full bloom –

bees bumping

into bees

caterpillar

leaving enough of the leaf

to sleep on

end of summer

a hermit crab caught

between homes

storm-swept beach –

inside an empty shell

empty barnacles

autumn dusk

the soft taste of

the apple’s bruise

in leafless autumn

I, too,

feel my nakedness

nursing home

she follows the spot of sun

with her wheelchair

border crossing –

cherry petals drift

into Canada

*

The three things most important to me when writing haiku:

That I stay true to the essential nature of the object or experience so that

I feel part of the natural world through empathy, not symbolism.

That I include a hint of the season, place or time for added resonance

between the natural world and the human response to it.

That the words used to describe the image are brief, sensory and carefully

selected to allow the reader to relate to the image through an emotional response brought about by a sense of shared experience.

Bio :

Carole MacRury, of Point Roberts, Washington, is an active member of

The arts community on both sides of the US/Canadian border.

After serving for three years as one of the judges for

the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival's Haiku Invitational,

she now leads haiku workshops for Haiku Garden.

Her work has been widely published in both U.S. and international journals

and in December, 2008, she released her first book,

"In the Company of Crows: Haiku and Tanka Between the Tides".

Her photographs have appeared on the covers of Ribbons, and Modern Haiku and were featured in a local gallery opening in 2007.