Blister / #HaikuSeed / Feature With Commentary

Featuring haiku written by Anna Orridge for the #HaikuSeed blister

Crocus heads blister
the soil, erupting in
purple tenderness

A Few Thoughts On the Haiku

At first the haiku felt too wordy. I had to find a dictionary for the word Crocus.

I could guess it was about a flower but the words the writer picked to use in the haiku somehow seem too potent, especially the prompt word blister and erupt, which, without a proper flair from the writer, might not go well alongside the tenderness of a flower. So I couldn’t shake off the feeling that this haiku, while amazing, was too wordy. But I kept looking at the verse for a few seconds, letting it sit with me.

The haiku slowly unfurled into a beautiful artwork in my mind and I began to truly understand and appreciate it.

I’m finding it hard to describe what I experienced reading this haiku as it evolved in my head. I quite strongly feel I will not be able to get my point across as I intend to, but I will try.

I had a short exchange with the writer and she said she used blister describing Crocuses because they grow in little clumps. It drew a smile from me because I had been looking at the whole thing with a different tone. She did not pair blister and erupt as such, both words have a disruptive nature to them. I thought she used blister describing the snapping of flower heads from the stem. Then after the blistering ejection of the flower comes the eruption of soil as the purple Crocus heads fall to the ground tenderly.

I realized then that the wordiness of the haiku I felt initially was not really that but it was my mind trying to accept the audacity of the writer to combine eruption and tenderness as she did.

Once this clicked in my head, I could hear snapping sounds of a blister of flowers blistering off the plant stems. Then I start seeing things relative to the size of soil and as the purple Crocus falls tenderly, the displacement of soil is so violent at this tiny scale that one can only call it an eruption, a word that is mostly used to describe things at the scale of volcanoes.

Reading this haiku and processing it was one hell of a journey. Thank you, Anna Orridge, for writing this amazing piece for #HaikuSeed.