🐌 Overhearing Issa’s Conversations With Creatures 🌌

There are a lot of great haiku and senryu submitted this week and it was difficult choosing which to comment on. I’m also preoccupied with other stuff related to designing the website and magazine, so this week’s commentary might not go too deep. But I hope you enjoy these brilliant haiku that beg your mind to imagine and think.

🍃

lake wind–
a wall ripples
in Chicago

Pippa Phillips

The idea of a wall rippling is too interesting to not stop and picture it. If the fragment in L1 (line 1) is not about wind in one form or another, do you see how the brilliantly written L2 might not work the same way. The idea of a wall covered in ivy or creepers rippling would be a stretch but Pippa quite cleverly and tenderly directs the reader

towards the desired interpretation of a wall rippling. From there on, it is up to the reader to interpret the phrase a wall ripples anyway they could.

Great haiku make you want to read them over and over again. Why? There is no single reason. Sometimes you do not understand what you read completely but the verse has your attention anyway. Sometimes you love the imagery and your mind can’t help but go back to the first line to relive it. And so on. But the result is that with every re-read the scene and moment the haiku captures becomes increasingly vivid and sensory. This haiku is doing that to me.

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