Houses encroach

I got a book on haiku today. It’s a leaving gift from a teacher I’ve never talked to before, and she didn’t talk to me then either, just left it on my desk. Squared and wrapped atop a pile of inky photocopies.

I never realised how referential haiku are. How dependent they are on context. One paragraph mentioned the first four syllables being an adaptation of a monk’s koan from nearly a thousand years ago. They didn’t talk about the fifth syllable and that made me think about it.

The fifth was e, and it was all about direction.

Posted in Shutterbug on Thursday June 22, 2006.