The Great Haiku

Bonsai tree

Wakings I

	Suddenly awake A moment of consciousness Burble burble burb… Suddenly awake Screams. Mother’s love—and instinct Soothe, soothe, soothe, soothe, soothe Suddenly awake Another gastric attack Shit Shit Shit Shit SHIT Suddenly awake The hare flees the harvesters Scythe, scythe, scythe, scythe, scythe Suddenly awake ICU staff stare at me How much of me left? Suddenly awake Flash! The lightning rips the curtain Then thunder, then rain Suddenly awake The Moon bores holes in doorways River fills with glass Suddenly awake Wearily flap to a branch Start the dawn chorus Suddenly awake —Reality rattles me Dreaming was better Suddenly awake The morphine pump’s functioning Not long to go now Suddenly awake Clap eyes on new certainties Born Again Christian Suddenly awake It is the Day of Judgement Uuuuuh—I’m all earthy Suddenly awake Much too dark for eye contact Enfold each other Suddenly awake The alarm pummels memory —You are not with me Suddenly awake Had an awful lot to drink —Who is this woman? Suddenly awake Pick at fragments of a dream Tide—wind—fear—water Suddenly awake Big black comforting silence Nightmares slowly fade The last four haiku are, in fact, a working-through of a form of DIY haiku; the fourteen words of the ‘conventional’ treatment of Basho’s original in the first haiku of the final sequence of five are rearranged in a more or less indeterminate fashion, after the manner of composers such as Boulez; the reader is invited to continue the experiment.
Wakings II
	Suddenly awake Who has textured the daylight? Frost on the window Suddenly awake Apparitions in the sky —For a pauper birth Suddenly awake I thrill to the seasons’ rounds The cuckoo’s returned Suddenly awake Strange feeling known from childhood Head like a big top Suddenly awake Fevered, I see wall patterns Vibrant with being Suddenly awake My cat raises one eyelid Suddenly asleep Suddenly awake During E7 night rate Start washing machine Suddenly awake Where in heaven’s name am I? —Oh yes—Basingstoke Suddenly awake Approaching the next station —Ours was the last one Suddenly awake I recognise sunlight—Shit! —Too much blood last night Suddenly awake Alongside his horse’s head —Offer not refused See footnotes. Suddenly awake Troubles, aches—now winter Never been this old Suddenly awake —Dreamt a familiar landscape I have never seen Suddenly awake Why has another day come? Life offers nothing Suddenly awake I find that life’s not all bad This is your doing Suddenly awake To new possibilities —An enlightenment Suddenly awake Heartbeats throb through my pillow —The rest is silence The last bridges the Master to his third sequence. This time a final thematic line leads to varied contemplations of more or less resolved finality.

Silences I
	Living on my own I spend the day with music The rest is silence The note shows a sound In musical notation The rest is silence Mahler’s Ninth concludes— Sounds are just half its beauty The rest is silence Music of the spheres Expands across the cosmos— The rest is silence Gardening, brewing, Faith and prayer for Trappists— The rest is silence Some of life’s funny Some makes us cry or rejoice The rest is silence Their words tear apart Each other, his her, hers him— The rest is silence Frenetic pleasure Desire noisily fulfilled The rest is silence Cinematic greats The majority talkies —The rest is silents Last message from space ‘Houston, we have a problem’— The rest is silence Above the waters News resounds of the sub’s doom —The rest is silence The crowd’s reaction As Hendry puts his cue on The rest is silence In all of language The greatest five syllables— The rest is silence Hamlet’s final words [not the last line of Hamlet] —The rest is silence Hero full of doubt Soliloquies and corpses— The rest is silence Sleep—perchance to dream, But that is surely false hope— The rest is silence All sound and fury, What is it we signify? The rest is silence
Silences II
	…Fortinbras bursts in Making a great deal of din The rest is chaos His choice for a wife— Happy?, Chirpy?, Chatty?, Nag? The best is silence Florida’s mostly Just a big peninsula The rest is islands Cue knocks and balls bang Spider scrapes along the baize The rest is silent Dictatorship falls CIA Conspiracy? The West is silent Old, beached cargo ship Years ago, not much left now —The rusty silence Ears pound and head aches Insanity beckons me Bereft of silence A guilty secret The world must never find out Incest in silence The ‘Jewish Problem’ The strong work in labour camps The rest are silenced Calmly they approach No fuss, no words, no escape Arrest is silent Nuclear missiles, Two fired. Prepare for launch of The rest in silos Bereaved. Friends, smile, talk Cry, hug. Some words stoke the pain The rest is solace Wife scolds and berates Husband’s tether ends and breaks The rest is silence Condemned person sits Electricity crackles The rest is silence A minute’s tribute For all our dead. Big Ben strikes The rest is silence Visit my doctor He explains my condition The rest is silence The world ends this way Not a bang—but a whimper —The rest is silence
Step by Step
	Step by step by step Climb up the steep cliff coast path The sea waves fare well Step by step by step She climbs the steep cliff coast path Worn out, her short pants Step by step by step The pilot climbs the staircase A flight, a landing Step by step by step But does it go up or down? Escher’s ‘House of stairs’ Step by step by step To Whispering Gallery —No lifts in St Paul’s Step by step by step The washing machine programme Wash, spin, wash, rinse, zzzzzzzzz Step by step by step Side by side by side by side By—who’s this Sondheim? Step by step by step And each time I get it wrong —Loathe ballroom dancing Step by step by step Inspect the guard of honour —What a load of prats! Step by step by step Russian armies march eastward Steppe by steppe by steppe Step by step by step The earth eclipses the moon —Stars in the high night Step by step by step The mouse approaches its goal At the treadmill’s end Step by step by step Last hopes of living dying —Path to the scaffold Step by step by step Their progress is eternal In Pompeii’s ash Step by step by step Trudging to their icy doom They may be some time Step by step by step The path to enlightenment —None of them easy Step by step by step Uncertain we move onward From old lives to new
Birds
	Passage migrants flown Life surrounded by sparrows —Need a kingfisher Great full-blooded gale Shoulder-charges the oak trees Seven crows blown loose High buzzard watching Each seem specks to the other —Under the same sky Mist treads on the fields Late brambles hang fruit heavy Young boughs bend with birds Boy on swing looks up Sees his first magpie in flight— A bird on a stick Two hours since you died Bleak dawn breaks—one lone starling Singing his heart out We share unhappy stars Horseshoes rare in our suburb At last—two magpies A single magpie Lies dead on the hard shoulder For one its sorrow Time cuffs, money shouts And I have no time for the Breath of a sparrow Woken, a strange bed Brown lake, trees green, evergreen Twelve white ducks quacking She looks for rabbits: Pigeon takes flight—she’s content —A flying rabbit Jumbo passes over Heron looks up from the lake ‘One hell of a bird’ No luck with the birds? Go visit Antarctica —Pick up a penguin The sad bird watcher And the joyous nightingale —Busy making notes The haiku cuckoo (Fifteen syllables missing) Calls across the wind The clock works poorly We’ll have to send it to the Cuckoos’ hospital See footnotes Haiku and you coo No need speak Pigeon English —All you need is Dove
Dividing Water Seventeen ‘Haikruise’ to recall a Circumnavigation of Britain. July/August 2012
	Arrive at Dover Congregation of strangers —The sea waves hello The crew’s ship’s cargo An old folks’ home in motion —Circling Saganauts Olds and very olds Couples long coupled still love —And weeping widows The Jurassic Coast Is now on our starboard beam —We have more fossils Frisian the barmaid ‘Like the cow’ she says, laughing —Far from Manila Alone on the deck Watching Britannia’s small waves —Drinking and thinking Cast off, fare forward! Between the past and future —Dividing water Archbishop on deck Wears a baseball cap. Mitre Looked better without Bishop comes on board Makes no diagonal moves Soon taken ashore Not just room service But ‘deck service’—prayers, hymns —Holy unforeseen Clamber in tenders At the shallow ports of call Big boat, small boat—whoosh! Just right for ‘old folk’ Is George Hamilton IV —A tall, kindly man Classical trio All the way from Belarus —Floating night music North through the Minches Round Cape Wrath (unfurious) —Scotland’s wild angle Gulls gather, terns turn Pretty wake—and kittiwakes —No sign of a whale Behold the gannet Best looks, best flight, best diver —Mad about the gull Disembarkation n cases (one stretcher case) Crew works Dovertime

NOTES

Wakings II/11: the horse’s head is a reference to the film ‘The Godfather’.

Birds 16: the ‘cuckoo’s hospital’ was composed in German, the German version will be found in Pun & Games.

Silence: ‘The rest is silence’ are the last words of Hamlet, the prince not Hamlet, the play. As Hamlet dies, Fortinbras and armed men enter and mayhem and speeches follow. The last words of the play are ‘Go—bid the soldiers shoot’.

Dividing Water:, an original title, suggests not only the ship’s cleaving of port from starboard but this, my longest sea voyage, cleaving the past when it was a possibility from the future when it becomes a memory. There is a serious ‘pivot’—see haiku 7—while the others are happy, lesser things, capturing moments and impressions and embellishing them with word play.
4   The Jurassic Coast runs west from Portland, our first port of call.
5 & 13   The crew were 95% male Filipino, the resident musicians and many of the ship’s officers were sons of the Soviet empire.
6   Small waves: not only calm seas but our one-time empire now less glorious. Not HMY which we moored next to at Leith. Students of my haiku of which there are many (haiku not students) will recognise drinking and thinking as a repeat. The only one.
7   The pivot. The first two lines are inspired by Eliot’s The Dry Salvages:

Fare forward travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future…
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you..
You are not those that who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark..
When time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.

8-10   The cruise had a ‘Christian add on’. The archbishop was George Carey, erstwhile of Canterbury, the visiting bishop was of Sodor and Man.
14   The North and South Minch are the channels that divide Skye and the Sutherland coast from the Outer Hebrides. Thence round Cape Wrath and through the Pentland Firth.
16   If gulls are saloon cars and terns gadabout sports cars, the gannet is a Bentley Continental—big, powerful, stylish. Seen in numbers near Grasholm off Milford Haven, off Scotland and in the Channel. They also breed on Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth which we passed in the dark.
17   At Dover we were asked to be clear of the gangway for a ‘medical disembark’.

The Great Haiku

Wakings I

Wakings II

Silences I

Silences II

Step by Step

Birds

Dividing Water

NOTES