As the weather warms, the nights are full of crickets chirping. I’ve long been intrigued by the contrast between their sheer noisiness and the depth of the night which they seem, in their own curious way, to express.
Are You Listening?
Quiet!
Be quiet!
Say the crickets.
Are you listening?
They say.
Be quiet!
Be quiet!
Be quiet!
They say.
Do you hear
How large the night is,
And how still it is beyond us?
Be quiet!
Be quiet!
Be quiet!
Say the crickets.
We are singing together
In a chorus.
We are telling you
Of the moon and the rain,
And how deep the night is
Beyond us.
Quiet!
Be quiet!
They say.
Are you listening?
Be quiet!
Be quiet!
Be quiet!
Be quiet!
Be quiet!
Say the crickets.
As my regular readers know, I’ve been writing haiku frequently for many, many months. Typically I have kept to the traditional structure, with its 5-7-5 syllable count. In many cases I’ve tried to maintain roughly the amount of information per line that would have been in a classic Japanese haiku, where the word balance is longer per syllable and certain ambiguities are a natural linguistic element.
But I’ve sometimes felt the expectations I’ve placed on myself were too artificial for the making of good poetry. And as I worked on this following haiku, I decided to craft it with the balance I wanted and to ignore the syllable count. I feel this gives it the sense of scale and slight open-endedness that I was looking for. I may do this more often.
Here are the results.
through a window
summer flies in
yellow petals
I like the sparser format for the haiku. Like espresso vs. cafe Americano.
I think you did a great job there, with that haiku, Amy. It's about the spirit of "the law", not the letter.
And I really loved the Cricket Song poem.