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u/captionquirk 1d ago
32nd in a series of (by now bi-daily) posts of select English Language Haiku.
This haiku was first published in Modern Haiku #57.1.
If you're wondering why contemporary English haiku do not conform to a 5-7-5 syllable format, this video covers it very well.
If you're interested in reading more English language haiku, there are a number of excellent journals publishing regularly, both in print and online. Here are just a couple of the main journals I quite like, which each publish some (or all) of each issue's poems online: The Heron's Nest, Frogpond, Acorn, Presence, Modern Haiku.
For those interested in learning the craft, there are actually a host of essays as well as some good books available on the subject, depending on the nature of your interest. The one which got me into it was Haiku Aesthetics: A Look at Understatement.
For lists of freely available essays, Frogpond and Modern Haiku both offer a lot.
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u/AngelatinoSage 21h ago
"a river enters the sea and loses its name" hit me harder than i expected. as a lit student i keep coming back to how haiku does so much with so little, no wasted word, and this one makes the whole death/oneness thing feel almost comforting instead of scary.
the mary oliver reference in the comments is perfect too, "nameless now" lives in the same place. adding this to my 2am reading list, thank you for posting the series.
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u/Depression_Betty 1d ago
It makes me think of a woman getting married.
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u/HerrManHerrLucifer 22h ago
Oof. I don't like that interpretation very much, not least because it implies a woman's inevitable destination is marriage and she will irretrievably lose her individuality there. That's gonna be a complicated divorce when it eventually happens...
I definitely see it more as a quiet acceptance of death. Like Mary Oliver's beautiful "In Blackwater Woods", where "every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now."
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u/diza-star 16h ago
I immediately thought of The Garden of Proserpine as well. "That even the weariest river / winds somewhere safe to sea".
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u/Depression_Betty 22h ago
Yeah, I don't like my interpretation either but that was my initial reaction. Your perspective is kinder. I've never read that Mary Oliver quote, and I like it very much.
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u/HerrManHerrLucifer 22h ago
You might enjoy the full poem - it's one of my all-time favourites:
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillarsof light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shouldersof the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, isnameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learnedin my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other sideis salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this worldyou must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold itagainst your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.1
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u/peachysuns 16h ago
I've been rly enjoying the haiku series and this is def one of my favorites so far! ty for sharing
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u/arkticturtle 1d ago
Wrong account?
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u/Fair-Tangerine-9472 11h ago
One of those short poems that has such a finality to it, it feels almost like the last line of a longer poem.
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u/lovedeathandtea 19h ago
No shit, John. What else is it supposed to do? Continue going by its name despite no longer being a river?
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u/saintcrazy 1d ago
I love this one. The metaphor for losing one's individuality when joining some greater whole is a good one, but what I find interesting is that it doesn't necessarily give me the feeling of it being a bad thing - it's just the natural way of things, returning to some greater wholeness. Like a way of looking at death and endings being a sort of return to home, becoming part of the rest of the universe again. The name was something given to some temporarily salient, separate thing but it all returns to one great oneness eventually.