Preserve Your Memories...Oriental Style

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Warm evening rain

Invites worm to wander---now

S-shape, frozen stiff.

Even without a title, however, haiku can catch the seasons in their endless progressions:

Brown leaf carpet waits--

Ready to ride swooping winds

For one last frolic.

Left standing empty

My small wheelbarrow is now

Overflowing---snow!

Against Loudoun Heights

Shad bushes---crook beckoning

Fingers toward spring.

Summer and ripe fruits

In the air a pungent scent--

Jelly, boiled over.

A form of poetry slightly longer than a haiku-the tanka, which has 31 syllables-gives still another turn of thought by adding two lines of seven syllables each. Furthermore, if the extra lines are composed by a second party, an element of play is added to your poetry. This poem, for instance, was "capped" by a friend with whom I corresponded weekly for some 17 years. Such cooperative poetic ventures added much interest to the exchange of letters: I wrote:

A cricket is chirping---

Playing second fiddle on

One single glad note.

My friend added:

Ah, little cricket, you are

Foretelling fall, then winter.

See: No expensive equipment. No clutter. No deterioration with the passage of time. No depletion of your store regardless of how much you share it. All of life's sensory delightsthe taste of nectar, the scent of mingled wild roses and honeysuckle on a sun-warmed hillside, the gossamer touch of autumn's floating spidersilk, the soft plop of a falling ripe plummay be preserved indefinitely by this simple method. Nothing in nature is too miniscule to give the observant onlooker a joy entirely out of proportion to its size . . . nor to form the subject of a poem. The haiku is entirely consistent with a lifestyle based on the economy of nature, since even the nonpalpable--the evanescent-may be so delicately crystallized for future enjoyment.

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