A series of short poems to celebrate International Haiku Poetry Day and the imminent return to normal life – as best as we can remember it.
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11 haikus on a return to normalcy
The haiku is a short poetry form, originating in Japan, that typically adheres to a 17-syllable structure, organised across three lines of five, seven, and five each. You’ve probably seen one before; in any case, you just scrolled through one on the image above.
Haikus have a long, rich history. Once used simply as the opening, tone-setting stanza of a longer Japanese poetry form called renga, the poem began to appear in its more independent form by the last 17th Century, thanks in particular to Matsuo Bashō, the most eminent poet of Japan’s Edo period. Famously, Bashō promoted the independence of what was then called hokku, and elevated the form from a playful form to a sublime one. By roughly the late 19th Century, the form had become known as haiku, and was refined as a nature sketch in words, meant to evoke place and feeling.
Since then, the haiku has exploded. Since the mid-20th Century, haikus have been collected, translated and written in English is now celebrated as an elastic poetry form that, as translator Adam L. Kern points out in The Penguin Book of Haiku, can not only be poignant and zen-like but also “erotic, funny, crude and mischievous”. They can also be written by dogs; they can be painfully British.
Today, the haiku is celebrated worldwide every 17 April, as part of International Haiku Poetry Day. To celebrate the poetic form, its big day, and the slow return to regular life after a year of lockdown, here are ‘11 haikus on a return to normalcy’.
‘Best laid plans’, I think,
Striking from my to-do list,
‘Write lockdown novel’
•
Ah, sweet normalcy
The park hums with life again
Until it rains, obv
•
Do you remember
How we used to socialise?
One of us has to
•
The takeaway pint
Proffers one big takeaway:
Sitting down was nice
•
Brave the toilet queue?
Or do we travel home, and back
Duration: the same
•
Ah! My friend, from Zoom
I didn’t recognise you
Sans your glitchy voice
•
Meet you in the pub
As long as you booked it – please,
Tell me you booked it
•
What’s a holiday?
Is it sitting, with a book,
Like home, but on sand?
•
Oh, you’ve made a meme?
How clever of you to write,
‘Nature is healing’
•
What is confidence
If not a fresh new haircut
Not, thank god, self-done
•
How long now, until
We return to normal, and
I cancel some plans?
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Image: Mica Murphy / Penguin
